Scientists Discover First Quadruple Quasar

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Whoa, a quasar quartet. It's like a double rainbow. What does it all mean? Oh my God. Incredible. A quasar quartet. I can't believe it. It takes up the whole sky!

Quasars -- the bursts of glowing gas that surround black holes as they swallow everything around them -- aren't usually found right next to each other. But researchers recently found four in a row, a quasar quartet.
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That's four super massive black holes devouring a lot of matter. Well, that region of space is sterilized.
 
So, for the physicists among us, why aren't the black holes being sucked into one another as a result of the gravitational forces generated by each one. Or, are they...and it's just taking a few hundred million years for the big merger to happen.....????
 
HeadRusch said:
So, for the physicists among us, why aren't the black holes being sucked into one another as a result of the gravitational forces generated by each one. Or, are they...and it's just taking a few hundred million years for the big merger to happen.....????
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You don't need to be a physicist. The distances you're seeing in the image are likely to be mindnumbingly immense, it's just from over here when looking at that area of space that they look close together.

What you're seeing is a galactic core outshining the entire output of the billions of stars surrounding it for a brief time in it's history, that's why it's so rare to see this. It also gives you a good sense of scale, these things are very, very far apart, or were at the time of the light that we're seeing being sent out, 10 billion years ago, in any case.

From the article:
"Quasars constitute a brief phase of galaxy evolution, powered by the accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. During this phase, they are the most luminous objects in the universe, shining hundreds of times brighter than their host galaxies, which themselves contain hundreds of billions of stars. But these hyper-luminous episodes last only a tiny fraction of a galaxy's lifetime. As a result, quasars are exceedingly rare and are typically separated by hundreds of millions of light years from one another. The researchers estimate that the odds of discovering a quadruple quasar by chance is one in ten million."
 
Im not a physicist but I love astronomy and have been an amateur enthusiast since I was a kid. Black holes do get caught in each others gravity every once in a while. Theyll orbit each other for a few million years before finally colliding and causing a massive, mind blowing explosion. The output that comes from the collision of black holes is considered the most powerful event that happens in the universe with an output greater than many times that of all the stars in the known universe!!!
 
I didn't read the article, everything you discuss when dealing with celestial bodies is massive, measured in hundreds or millions of light-years. I thought finding 4 quasars grouped together meant you had 4 dead stars in close proximity to one another, if this is just quasars lining up on a plane (or being in close proximity in celestial terms, separated by thousands or millions of light-years), I probably should have read the article before posting the question.

Live and learn.
 
HeadRusch said:
I didn't read the article, everything you discuss when dealing with celestial bodies is massive, measured in hundreds or millions of light-years. I thought finding 4 quasars grouped together meant you had 4 dead stars in close proximity to one another, if this is just quasars lining up on a plane (or being in close proximity in celestial terms, separated by thousands or millions of light-years), I probably should have read the article before posting the question.

Live and learn.
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It's what the headline makes you think, so it's understandable, still, the chances of finding something like this is rediculously tiny.

The fact that we don't get pulled into the black hole at the center of our galaxy would mean that these would have to be extremely close together to interact, probably so close that you would be hard pressed to be able to view them apart from these distances.

Though, that also has to do with our spinning momentum IIRC, stationary objects would be able to interact more easily (again, IIRC).
 
Quasars are super massive blackholes that are in their life cycle of swallowing nearby massive clumps of matter. The reason finding multiples are very difficult is because a super massive blackhole typically only exists at the center of a large galaxy, like the Milky Way. The super massive blackhole at the center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius A*, and it's about 26k light years from Earth.

The distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda, the nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years and at the center of Andromeda is another super massive blackhole.

However the Milky Way and Andromeda are "old" galaxies, or more specifically, they are nearby and we can view them as more recent objects. Our super massive blackholes might have been quasars at one point, but enough time has passed so that they have consumed everything nearby to them so they are no longer blasting radiation to be classified as a quasar.

When we look at the quadruple quasar system, which is about 10 billion light years away, we are looking at the quasars as they existed 10 billion year ago when their galaxies were much younger. This is why we only find quasars at extremely far distances near the edge of the observable universe when the universe was still young.

As noted in the articles, typically quasars are 100 million light years apart because that means they are consuming matter and as a result are in a young galaxy, near the edge of the observable universe/existed early in the universe. The fact that 4 are nearby means that 4 massive galaxies merged relatively early in the universe, creating massive amounts of matter in a "relatively small area" and that the 4 super massive blackholes from those 4 galaxies are somewhat tied together by gravity. In this case all 4 are only about 700k light years apart, but for reference the Milky Way galaxy is only about 100k light years in diameter. So we are still talking huge distances, but still relatively small when it comes to quasars and small when we look at "typical" galaxy-to-galaxy distances.

So the 1-in-10 million odds of finding something like this is based on the super rare occurrence that:
1. A large enough galaxy to hold a large enough star formed early enough in the universe's life
2. A star big enough to go super nova and form a large enough black hole went through its life cycle early enough in that galaxy
3. There was enough time for that black hole to gobble up enough matter to be classified as super massive
4. Three other of these galaxies with the same conditions formed close enough together
5. The relative movement of those galaxies weren't enough to escape each other
6. The 4 galaxies merged with each other to clump enough matter densely enough to form 4 quasars in close proximity and this happened early enough in the universe lifetime so that we are able to see it now

So yes, it's pretty amazing!
 
Some jokester on Pandora threw four Longbow Quasar grenades in the sky. :D
 
For those wondering, a quasar is a super massive black hole found in the center of galaxies that are in the middle of feeding. More matter than the black hole can handle and the black hole ejects the matter in jets from it's poles.
 
10 billion light years away... Gives you a sense of how bright these things were.

I wonder if there are any scientists over in that distant galaxy looking in our direction. They'd be seeing the light from the formation of the Milky Way 10 billion years ago. They'd be completely oblivious to the fact that their galaxy was once an interesting quad-quasar anomaly that could be seen from across the universe.

I need some weed.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
10 billion light years away... Gives you a sense of how bright these things were.
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That was the rub with them initially, when they were first discovered they were thought to be closer based upon how bright they were, then they looked at the redshift and realized they were extremely distant objects which had luminosities many times that of a whole galaxy.
 
Ashbringer said:
For those wondering, a quasar is a super massive black hole found in the center of galaxies that are in the middle of feeding. More matter than the black hole can handle and the black hole ejects the matter in jets from it's poles.
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I didn't think it was necessarily a super massive black hole. I thought any run of the mill black hole could be a quasar. For instance a black hole forms in a nebula and starts feeding on the gas.

As I understood it the jets were because the gas was spinning so fast as it funneled into the black hole into am accretion disc and the matter is ejected at the poles at speeds close to the speed of light. It's not so much the black hole can't handle the amount of matter, it's just that it's forced out before it enters the event horizon due to the unbelievable heat, friction and speed that is present in the accretion disc near the horizon.
 
MacLeod said:
I didn't think it was necessarily a super massive black hole. I thought any run of the mill black hole could be a quasar. For instance a black hole forms in a nebula and starts feeding on the gas.

As I understood it the jets were because the gas was spinning so fast as it funneled into the black hole into am accretion disc and the matter is ejected at the poles at speeds close to the speed of light. It's not so much the black hole can't handle the amount of matter, it's just that it's forced out before it enters the event horizon due to the unbelievable heat, friction and speed that is present in the accretion disc near the horizon.
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I think the black hole has to be of sufficient size to cause the "jet". Probably needs a certain amount of gravity to pull enough matter to it to cause the effect. As far as I know it's only been observed from "super massive" black holes. The last part of what you said I think is essentially correct. In the end, when too much matter is going "in" some gets ejected out along the magnetic poles of the black hole.

I believe it's the same principal as what causes the gamma ray burst. When the center of the giant star collapses, the core tries to gobble up the star around it and what it can't it ejects out along the poles. Simply speaking anyway.
 
ViperGrendal said:
I think the black hole has to be of sufficient size to cause the "jet". Probably needs a certain amount of gravity to pull enough matter to it to cause the effect. As far as I know it's only been observed from "super massive" black holes. The last part of what you said I think is essentially correct. In the end, when too much matter is going "in" some gets ejected out along the magnetic poles of the black hole.

I believe it's the same principal as what causes the gamma ray burst. When the center of the giant star collapses, the core tries to gobble up the star around it and what it can't it ejects out along the poles. Simply speaking anyway.
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Gotcha. GRB's are cool as shit. I remember when they first observed them and didnt have a clue what they were. They were thinking they were one massive and I mean MASSIVE explosion! They had a couple specials on Discovery Channel about it and it was cool as shit trying to theorize what it could possibly be.
 
MacLeod said:
Im not a physicist but I love astronomy and have been an amateur enthusiast since I was a kid. Black holes do get caught in each others gravity every once in a while. Theyll orbit each other for a few million years before finally colliding and causing a massive, mind blowing explosion. The output that comes from the collision of black holes is considered the most powerful event that happens in the universe with an output greater than many times that of all the stars in the known universe!!!
Click to expand...

Though this can certainly happen, something that upsets me even more is the concept of electro-repulsive black holes orbiting one another. Black holes with opposing charges and spins colliding lead to a black hole being ejected, at nearly the speed of light, from it's orbital/binary pair. This

Ashbringer said:
For those wondering, a quasar is a super massive black hole found in the center of galaxies that are in the middle of feeding. More matter than the black hole can handle and the black hole ejects the matter in jets from it's poles.
Click to expand...

I'm fairly sure there's much more at work than "more matter than it can handle" - simply because the efficiencies of energy output reach half of E as predicted by general relativity. Which is incredible, considering how inefficient most power generating processes are at converting energy - but for the life of me, I don't know what other processes are at work here. Perhaps friction, electric repulsion leading to compton scattering, perhaps electrons jumping to insane energy states and dropping down to release gamma photons etc.
 
Arcygenical said:
I'm fairly sure there's much more at work than "more matter than it can handle" - simply because the efficiencies of energy output reach half of E as predicted by general relativity. Which is incredible, considering how inefficient most power generating processes are at converting energy - but for the life of me, I don't know what other processes are at work here. Perhaps friction, electric repulsion leading to compton scattering, perhaps electrons jumping to insane energy states and dropping down to release gamma photons etc.
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Probably electromagnetic forces are the reason for the massive ejections they create, like Quasars. Black holes must spin and we do know they have poles The super heated particles are probably reaching the poles and ejecting at incredible speeds.

We spring around the Earth. The Earth spins around the Sun. The Sun spins around the super massive black hole in the middle of the milky way. We all spin relative to the black holes poles, which if it was eating we'd see jets like a Quasar.
 
That's what I understood it to be. You've got gasses being pulled in under unimaginable gravitational forces which are causing them to funnel in at speeds close to the speed of light and this causes an incredible amount of friction which super heats the gas. And since the poles are the stopping point when the gas from one side meets the other, the insane heat, friction and speed blast them out along with massive amounts of radiation.
 
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