Conjecture on Baez's 'Quasar without a host galaxy'
- From: stargene@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:36:35 +0000 (UTC)
In a recent John Baez post he mentions discovery of probably
the first known quasar found without a host galaxy. He says:
"Quasars are thought to be super massive black holes; they're
usually found in the centers of galaxies, where they devour
stars and shoot out enormously powerful jets of radiation.
However, the quasar HE0450-2958 is surrounded only by a blob
of ionized gas. Nearby, a wildly disturbed spiral galaxy can
be seen. (See the NASA website above for a picture.)
Did this quasar begin life in this galaxy and then get kicked
out when the galaxy collided with something containing a super-
massive black hole?"
I suggest that a fairly ordinary explanation may be that the
nearby "wildly disturbed" galaxy may have contained several
supermassive black holes which interacted via a gravitational
slingshot scenario. This would be like a larger version of
the effect where smaller mass stars can be flung out of glob-
ulare clusters when encountering larger mass stars near the
cluster center.
Whether the quasar has a velocity vector consistent with
being 'flung' out of the nearby galaxy I don't know. One
can imagine it leaving the core of that galaxy with a cargo
of entrained gas and stars, engulfing them at its leisure.
.
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