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Four Quasars Found Clustered Together Defy Current Cosmological Expectations

Posted by samzenpus on from the standing-out-in-a-crowd dept.

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.

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Hey don't be biased by Virtucon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They're just in a new intergalactic living arrangement is all.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  2. Lensing? by laughingskeptic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The original paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.0378... mentions the red-shift and spectral similarities of 3 of the observed quasars without mentioning the possibility that they may be the result of gravitational lensing by the fourth object and could possibly be millions of light years behind the 4th object.

  3. Gravitational lensing, maybe by ITRambo · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Maybe multiple gravitational lensing is somehow confusing things. That or the universe took fertility pills and had quadruplets.