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Four Quasars Found Clustered Together Defy Current Cosmological Expectations

StartsWithABang writes: Get a supermassive black hole feeding on matter, particularly on large amounts of cool, dense gas, and you're likely to get a quasar: a luminous, active galaxy emitting radiation from the radio all the way up through the X-ray. Our best understanding and observations indicate that these objects should be rare, transient, and isolated; no more than two have ever been found close together before. Until this discovery, that is, where we just found four within a million light years of one another, posing a problem for our current theories of structure formation in the Universe.

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lensing? by forand · · Score: 3, Informative

    I haven't read the whole paper but in short: no they looked at each object with sufficient sensitivity to rule that out.

  2. Re:Quite the opposite by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    100% of galaxies have supermassive black holes near them.

    Not quite.

    http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

    So four galaxies around the same age had nearly the same mass by sheer random probability

    That's one possibility. Funny thing about science, though, is that it isn't just going to shrug and say "Eh. Probability." and ignore something interesting.

    "We looked at 1% of the universe and didn't see something like this so it must be impossible" is not valid science.

    No, it's not. But then no-one's saying that.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.