Portsmouth scientists unravel quasar mystery that has baffled scientists for decades

The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed – something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years – has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings have been published in Nature .

The existence of over 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes and forming less than a billion years after the Big Bang had remained one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so early.

The team of experts led by Dr Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth have found that the first quasars naturally formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare reservoirs of gas in the early universe.

Dr Whalen, senior lecturer at the university’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: ‘We think of these stars as a bit like dinosaurs on earth, they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years before collapsing to black holes.

“Our supercomputer models went back to very early times and found that the cold, dense streams of gas capable of growing a billion solar-mass black hole in just a few hundred million years created their own supermassive stars without any need for unusual environments.

‘This simple, beautiful result not only explains the origin of the first quasars but also their demographics – their numbers at early times.’