Quasars are found throughout the Universe, but quasar pairs are rare. “We estimate that in the distant universe, for every 1,000 quasars, there is one double quasar. So finding these double quasars is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Dr. Yue Shen of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explains. These newly-recognized pairs are the oldest of the 100 or so quasar pairs currently known to astronomers. The quasar pairs examined in this study are seen as they were the distant past, less than four billion years after the Big Bang. As the quasars drifted toward each other, energy would…
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