Quasars are loners. This is not because they do not get along with their colleagues, but has something to do with their nature. They are nuclei of active galaxies. And every galaxy has only one nucleus. Billions of stars can rotate badly around several cores. Nevertheless, astronomers have now found two quasar pairs at a distance of about ten billion light years as they report in Nature Astronomy. (más…)

In the 1950s, astronomers discovered radio sources to which point-like, i.e. star-like objects could be assigned in the visible light range. Until then, whole galaxies had been identified as radio sources. The findings were called "quasi-stellar objects", or quasars for short. Later, however, researchers realized that quasars are embedded in galaxies after all, and in fact constitute their active nuclei radiating in many wavelength ranges. That they had been seen only as point sources was simply because they are very, very distant. In fact, they are the most distant objects in the universe that we can observe. This is…