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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.

6 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.

    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.

  3. Re:Not to worry by nfras · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 :)

    --
    You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
  4. Re:Not to worry by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 4, Funny

    They rolled snake eyes twice in a row.

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

    --
    You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  5. 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.