Re: Conjecture on Baez's 'Quasar without a host galaxy'


stargene@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> In a recent John Baez post he mentions discovery of probably
> the first known quasar found without a host galaxy. He says:
>
> 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.

Alternatively, perhaps this is an exceptionally old black hole,
which formed from a large star (several hundred solar masses?)
itself formed from an unusually dense clump of gas in the midst
of more rarified gas that had insufficient time to coelesce
significantly before the star exploded in a supernova and
drove the surrounding gas away sufficiently far to leave the
black hole moreorless isolated thereafter.

.