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Serendipitous observations reveal rare event in life of distant quasar

A team of astronomers from UCSC and the University of Florida discovered the onset of a huge flow of gas from a quasar, the super-bright core of an extremely remote young galaxy. The gas was expelled from the quasar and its enormous black hole sometime in the space of four years around 10 billion years ago–an extremely brief and ancient blip detectable only through the unlikely convergence of two separate observational efforts.