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'Now this one was taken in February 1982,' said astrophysicist Stephen Unwin. I peered over his shoulder at a greenish image on the screen of a computer terminal in a [...]

In the June 1988 issue of Astronomy, Jeff Kanipe wrote about the hunt for the most distant quasars -- those that formed as quickly as dark matter would allow after [...]

One of the major discoveries in galaxy evolution is that most massive galaxies each harbor a supermassive black hole a million to a billion times heavier than the Sun. These [...]

The most distant quasar known, ULAS J1120+0641, contains no heavy elements, according to a paper published in Nature on December 6. The active galaxy is 13.3 billion light-years from Earth, [...]

Recent observations made with telescopes worldwide are shedding light on what may be either the most distant galaxy known or a puff of celestial gas lit up by a quasar's [...]

Extragalactic astronomers were astounded last year when the Hubble Space Telescope apparently failed to find some of the galaxies in which every quasar is thought to reside. Now two recent [...]

Astronomers have used a distant quasar as a cosmic searchlight to illuminate dark, primeval gas clouds thought to be galaxies' building blocks. Reporting in an upcoming Monthly Notices of the [...]

Gamma-ray burst and optical transients have always had a common trait: upon detecting either one, observers rush to find a source for the anomaly and usually come up with the [...]

Farthest Thing Seen 'Last August the limit of the known universe was pushed back once again. The new distance champion is a 20th-magnitude quasar in Sculptor that has been found [...]

Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, [...]

space SACLAY, France -- Astronomers have long Space wondered what comes first: galaxies such as our Milky Way or the black holes that reside at their centers, madly devouring all [...]

Astronomers sifting though the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have turned up what seems to be a fast-orbiting, tight binary quasar. Two supermassive black holes are apparently revolving around each [...]

Gamma-ray Mystery 'Since their discovery a decade ago, the mysterious celestial gamma-ray bursters have refused to give up the secret of their origin. To date no object detected at any [...]

Measuring the composition of some of the earliest structures in the universe, two teams of astronomers have unveiled new findings about star formation when the cosmos was young. In one [...]