A group of astronomers led by Joseph Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have made a remarkable discovery. The researchers have found a quadruple quasar in the early universe. Quasars, which represent actively feeding black holes, are normally separated by hundreds of millions of light years. Not only are these objects close together but, based on models of the early universe, they probably shouldn’t exist.

A quasar is the active state of a black hole. When material gets close to a black hole it forms an accretion disk. As it spins in the massive gravity of the black hole it heats up to millions of degrees. This creates tremendous amounts of radiation and the magnetic field of the black hole blasts that radiation outward for millions of light years, making the quasars incredibly bright and visible for far greater distances.

When a black hole is not feeding, the quasar dies down and goes dark. Typically, a quasar lasts approximately 10 million years, a fraction of the lifetime of a galaxy so astronomers consider themselves lucky when they find a quasar in the act. In this case, the researchers estimate that the odds of finding a quadruple quasar are about one in 10 million.

The four quasars the group discovered are surrounded by an immense nebula of dense, cool hydrogen gas. Hannawi and his team dubbed this the “Jackpot nebula” because of the rare quasar activity. Because of the light from the active black holes the entire nebula is very bright. The nebula and its quasars are located in a particularly dense area.

There are several hundred times more galaxies in this region than you would expect to see at these distances” explains J. Xavier Prochaska, professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. Prochaska is the principal investigator for the research with the Keck observatory in Hawaii, which was used to make the observations.

The system, according to the researchers, resembles a modern galaxy cluster however the area is 10 billion light years from Earth, which means that it existed at a time when the universe was only about 3.5 billion years old. This makes it a proto-cluster or prginator of present galaxy clusters.

“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,” said Hennawi in a statement.

The researchers speculate that something that was going on in that area, at that time, made quasar activity more common. One possibility is that galactic collisions in the dense area were more frequent, feeding more material into galactic black holes.

“The giant emission nebula is an important piece of the puzzle since it signifies a tremendous amount of dense cool gas,” says Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy who was involved in the discovery.

The massive cloud of hydrogen could, itself have helped to feed the black holes. However, given current models of that period in the formation of the universe, the giant cloud should not really be there.

“Our current models of cosmic structure formation based on supercomputer simulations predict that massive objects in the early universe should be filled with rarefied gas that is about ten million degrees, whereas this giant nebula requires gas thousands of times denser and colder,” Sebastiano Cantalupo of ETH Zurich, a co-author of the study which appears in this weeks edition of the journal Science.

Despite the anomalies and unanswered questions, the discovery provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of massive structures in the early universe.