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  • 6 days ago
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00:04When looking deep into space, we're actually peering back in time at light that was produced possibly millions of years
00:10ago.
00:10But back in 1979, astronomers noticed a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of two gas-filled galaxies,
00:17also known as quasars.
00:18But it turned out those two quasars were actually the same object, with one of the images delayed by something
00:23out in space.
00:24Recently, a team of astronomers from the University of Valencia discovered the same thing happening again.
00:29Over the course of 14 years, they clocked a 6.73-year delay between the two images of the same
00:35quasar.
00:36Experts say that the nearby cluster of galaxies is the culprit, creating a sort of cosmic gravitational lens that distorts
00:42the light that passes through it.
00:43That lens changed the light's path, forcing it to seemingly slow down and producing multiple images of the same object
00:49in space at different points in time.
00:51In the case of this newer quasar, four images, with the researchers writing,
00:55Since the trajectory followed by the light rays to form each image is different, we observe them at different instances
01:00of time.
01:01In this case, we have to wait 6.73 years for the signal we observed in the first image to
01:06be reproduced in the fourth one.
01:08Thank you very much.
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