From The Daily Galaxy.
“We have been able to confirm that, indeed, apart from the highly energetic and rapidly evolving quasars, there is another population that evolves slowly. This population of quasars appears to follow the quasar main sequence discovered by Sulentic and colleagues in 2000. There does not even seem to be a strong relation between this type of quasars, which we see in our environment and those ‘monsters’ that started to glow more than ten billion years ago”, says Ascensión del Olmo another IAA-CSIC researcher taking part in the study.
They have, nonetheless, found differences in this population of quiet quasars. “The local quasars present a higher proportion of heavy elements such as aluminium, iron or magnesium, than the distant relatives, which most likely reflects enrichment by the birth and death of successive generations of stars,” says Jack W. Sulentic (IAA-CSIC). “This result is an excellent example of the new perspectives on the universe which the new 10 meter-class of telescopes such as GTC are yielding,” the researcher concludes.