HILO, Hawai'i — Astronomers using a telescope on Mauna Kea have discovered the first triple quasar, a gathering of what is believed to be three black holes about 100,000 light years apart from one another that are each blasting out energy greater than the power released from an entire galaxy.

S. George Djorgovski, leader of the research team and astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, said the collection of quasars was likely caused by galaxies colliding, a cosmic smash-up that will be completed over the next 200 million years or so.

"The picture that we have in mind is that this is an encounter of at least three galaxies that are gravitationally interacting, and will probably merge together to make one giant galaxy, and the three black holes will merge," Djorgovski said.

The discovery of three quasars pulling at each other about 10.5 billion light years from Earth was accomplished with the twin telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, and was announced at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

The finding by scientists from the Cal Tech team and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland was confirmed with observations from European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Quasars are rare and brilliant energy producers. Although only as large as our solar system, some quasars release light and other radiation that is vastly greater than the energy generated by 100 billion stars. That is far too powerful to be explained in terms of the ordinary nuclear reactions that fuel stars.

Quasars are instead believed to be fueled by gas falling into supermassive black holes. Scientists believe gas is violently accelerated and heated as it is pulled into the black holes, and it releases energy as light, X-rays and radio waves.

Almost all large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have black holes at their center, and about 100,000 quasars have been discovered so far. Scientists have determined quasars were more common when the universe was about one-quarter of its present age, but they aren't sure why.

Astronomers have found dozens of paired quasars, but the finding announced this month was the first known quasar trio.

Djorgovski calculated that the odds that three quasars would randomly wind up so close to one another are about one in 200 trillion.

That implies "it can't be by chance, there has to be a physical reason why we see three of them together so close, and the physical reason is that galaxy encounters and interactions are what turn the quasars on," Djorgovski said.

He said scientists were observing the quasar trio as they appeared when the universe was younger, a period in cosmic history when collisions between galaxies were "at their peak" and much more common than they are now.

That look back through time was possible because the quasars are — or were — 10.5 billion light years away, meaning astronomers were actually observing the quasars as they appeared 10.5 billion years ago.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.