Seven Needles, 800,000 Haystacks

Universe Today reports that astronomers at Ohio State used a neural network to find seven rare gravitational lensing quasars among eight hundred thousand candidates. A quasar is a supermassive black hole actively consuming material, so bright it drowns out its host galaxy. That brightness makes weighing the galaxy itself nearly impossible—but when background light bends around that galaxy, the bending reveals its mass. Such alignments are vanishingly rare, making this discovery significant for understanding how black holes and galaxies co-evolved.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton