PIA10093: Bursting with Stars and Black Holes (Artist Concept)
 Mission:  Spitzer Space Telescope
 Product Size:  3000 x 2400 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  California Institute of Technology 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA10093.tif (21.6 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA10093.jpg (501.4 kB)


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The newfound quasars belong to a long-lost population that had been theorized to be buried inside dusty, distant galaxies, but were never actually seen. While some quasars are easy to detect because they are oriented in such a way that their X-rays point toward Earth, others are oriented with their surrounding doughnut-clouds blocking the X-rays from our point of view. In addition, dust and gas in the galaxy itself can block the X-rays.

Astronomers had observed the most energetic of this dusty, or obscured, bunch before, but the "masses," or more typical members of the population, remained missing. Using data from Spitzer and Chandra, the scientists uncovered many of these lost quasars in the bellies of massive galaxies between 9 and 11 billion light-years away. Because the galaxies were also busy making stars, the scientists now believe most massive galaxies spent their adolescence building up their stars and black holes simultaneously.

The Spitzer observations were made as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey program, which aims to image the faintest distant galaxies using a variety of wavelengths.

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