How do supermassive black holes grow? AI finds 7 spacetime-warping ‘quasars’ that could help solve the mystery
AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication
Astronomers using intelligence have uncovered seven new quasars that act as gravitational lenses, a class of objects that magnify light from more distant galaxies. The team trained a machine‑learning model on simulated lens configurations and applied it to the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) catalog of roughly 800,000 quasars, narrowing the field to about 200 candidates before manual inspection produced the final seven. The discoveries double the number of such systems identified through survey data and promise a view of both the foreground quasar and the background galaxy whose light is bent by the quasar’s gravity. Researchers say confirming the lenses will enable studies of how actively feeding supermassive black holes evolve into the massive black holes that dominate galaxies.
💡 Why It Matters
- · By revealing hidden gravitational‑lens quasars, the find gives astronomers a rare tool to directly observe the environments of actively feeding black holes, opening a pathway to trace their growth from early stages to the giants seen today.