View Full Version : Triplet Quasars Discovered
Imagineer
01-14-2007, 03:09 AM
Scientists have discovered a trio of quasars that are close enough to be within the volume of one galaxy. Given that a quasar has roughly the mass of an entire galaxy, that is very close. Here is a link.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/11/three.black.holes/index.html
sedan
01-14-2007, 03:20 AM
"Quasars are extremely rare objects. To find two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space," said study leader George Djorgovski, an astronomer at Caltech. "To find three is unprecedented."Actually it would be very unlikely if they were evenly distributed. Random distribution means that given enough quasars the occurrence of three being relatively close to each other approaches a certainty.
LionelHutz
01-14-2007, 09:17 AM
My parents had a Quasar TV that was roughly the mass of a galaxy.
Imagineer
01-14-2007, 10:15 PM
Actually it would be very unlikely if they were evenly distributed. Random distribution means that given enough quasars the occurrence of three being relatively close to each other approaches a certainty.
Since, according to theory, quasars are created when a black hole absorbs the mass of a galaxy, the creation is not randomly distributed. They are created singly. Since quasars move, they sometimes encounter other quasars or other things. Gravity dictates the outcome of such encounters. Most times two quasars would merge to form a larger quasar. Occasionally they might wind up orbiting each other. It would be vanishingly rare for three quasars to form a stable group.
Other things a quasar might encounter are usually absorbed into it. Such an encounter could destroy a galaxy. The neighborhood of a quasar is usually pretty empty.