Astronomers Identify Earliest Compact Quasar Pair, Challenging Cosmological Models

An international team, using the Gemini North and James Webb Space Telescope, discovered Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the most distant and oldest compact quasar pair, existing 900 million years after the Big Bang. This finding, with quasars J1602+4228AB separated by 18,100 light-years, challenges current theories on how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early universe.