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Black Hole in Search of a Home

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-pick-up-that-hitchhiker dept.

jose parinas writes "Interesting news from the ESO observatory on Paranal about black holes that travel. From the article: 'For 19 of [the low redshift quasars], they found, as expected, that these super massive black holes are surrounded by a host galaxy. But when they studied the bright quasar HE0450-2958, located some 5 billion light-years away, they couldn't find evidence for an encircling galaxy. This, the astronomers suggest, may indicate a rare case of collision between a seemingly normal spiral galaxy and a much more exotic object harbouring a very massive black hole.'" More from the article: "Has the host galaxy been completely disrupted as a result of the collision? It is hard to imagine how that could happen. Has an isolated black hole captured gas while crossing the disc of a spiral galaxy? This would require very special conditions and would probably not have caused such a tremendous perturbation as is observed in the neighbouring galaxy. Another intriguing hypothesis is that the galaxy harbouring the black hole was almost exclusively made of dark matter." Update: 09/17 00:15 GMT by Z : Edited for clarity.

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Shiznit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hope that doesn't happen to the milky way.

  2. Hello? by DoubleEdd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Could the moderators check the grammar before submitting?

    20 20 sounds like the results of an eyesight test, and ' found that for 19 of them, they found,' - what?

  3. Article summary by jaymzter · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Astronomers investigating 20 20 low redshift quasars, found that for 19 of them, they found, as expected, that these super massive black holes are surrounded by a host galaxy.

    Definitely a case of grammatical structure in search of a home!
    --
    If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
  4. Re:Dark matter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "...so any galaxies being managed by advanced civilizations would effectively be invisible"
    ..except that the quasar itself was very detectable . That means we're either dealing with (1) an incredibly advanced civilization that for some reason keeps all the radiated energy from everything in their galaxy except the quasar for themselves, or (2) a quasar without a galaxy around it.

    Surely such an advanced civilization wouldn't let all the energy (and it would be quite a lot of energy if we can detect it all the way over here) from the quasar go to waste when they're so anal about the waste heat of everything else?

  5. Re:Why couldn't it have by forand · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The major problem with having a black hole eat an entire galaxy is conservation of angular momentum.