Britannica Sources used in this answer

Which astronomers proposed that supermassive black holes power quasars?

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six quasar host galaxies — Quasar Six quasar host galaxies, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Shown are apparently normal, solitary galaxies (left), colliding galaxies (centre), and merging galaxies (right).

The mechanism powering quasars—the accretion of matter by gravity onto supermassive black holes—was independently proposed shortly after the discovery of their extreme luminosity by Russian astronomers Yakov Zel’dovich and Igor Novikov, and the Austrian American astronomer Edwin Salpeter.12