Cracking the Mystery of Quasars: The Universe's Brightest Objects.

A team of astrophysicists led by Jonny Pierce of the University of Hertfordshire has found that quasar activity is triggered when two galaxies start the process of colliding and merging. By studying 48 nearby quasars and 100 similar galaxies with no quasar activity, they found that two-thirds of the quasars in their sample showed signs of being gravitationally disturbed by an encounter with another galaxy. This tells us that in a few billion years when the Milky Way starts to merge with Andromeda, our own galaxy is likely to become a blazing quasar.