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.

Comments

Not to worry

[SuperKendall]

This is just he exception that proves the rule.

It's when you find TWO exceptions, that you should start to worry about the rule itself...

Re:Not to worry

[ArcadeMan]

They found FOUR, what does that tell you?

Re:Not to worry

[nfras]

Thank you for the response with the exact level of pedanticness I would have gone for personally. You saved me some time.

I think you mean pedantry :)

Re:Not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah you see, English, it's a bitch. Since in this case, 'prove' means 'tests'. The term is also used in 'proving grounds' for cars or other machinery. If the exception really is an exception, then it is proven that the rule ain't no rule at all.

Re:Not to worry

[FatdogHaiku]

They rolled snake eyes twice in a row.

God not only plays dice, he's workin' on a YAHTZEE!

Re:Not to worry

[paradigmsareconstruc]

It tells me that people who follow science today -- professional scientists included -- try so hard to ignore scientific controversies that they basically undermine the entire scientific endeavor. What stands out with this "surprise" is that it has been less than two years since Halton Arp's death -- the man whose American telescope time was revoked because he claimed to see quasars ejecting in both directions from active galaxies. I have to imagine that this is not even a malicious omission. It's sincerely naive -- which is 100x worse, because what it suggests is that modern science is spinning its wheels with its refusal to teach the newer graduate students (and public) about the former scientific controversies.

Re:Not to worry

[Talderas]

That's a step above the level of pedantry he would have gone for.

Re:Not to worry

[g0bshiTe]

Given we haven't seen 1% of what's out there, what we are seeing with the 4 could be the norm. It's entirely possible everything we know so far is the exception.

Hey don't be biased

[Virtucon]

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

Lensing?

[laughingskeptic]

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.

Re:Lensing?

[forand]

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

Quick! Fire Up the EM Drive!

[l0ungeb0y]

We've got Physics to break!

Re:Quite the opposite

[wonkey_monkey]

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.