A group of astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii has made a significant discovery. While surveying the sky, they have discovered a quadruple quasar in the early universe.

Researchers affirmed that the four quasars are surrounded by a nebula of dense, cold hydrogen gas. Lead researcher Joseph Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has termed these quasars as ‘Jackpot nebula’, owing to the rare quasar activity.

The nebula is quite bright because of the light from the active black holes. J. Xavier Prochaska, professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, affirmed that this region has several hundred times more galaxies that one could expect to witness at such great distances.

As per the researchers, the system is similar to a modern galaxy cluster. The area is 10 billion light years away from earth, which means that it is present from the time when the universe was in its initial stages like around 3.5 billion years old.

“If you discover something which, according to current scientific wisdom, should be extremely improbable, you can come to one of two conclusions: either you just got very lucky, or you need to modify your theory”, affirmed Hennawi.

Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy said that they are quite excited about nebula, as it indicates about a tremendous amount of dense cool gas. It is being speculated that the huge cloud of hydrogen might be feeding the black hole.

Quasars are considered to be quite a rare phenomenon that takes place when sufficient amount of matter falls into the accretion disc around a supermassive black hole to generate a lot of energy. Talking about how quasars are formed then they are the result of collision of two galaxies.