woah... Two black holes tango inside distant quasar

[substance]

hi guys, haven`t been around lately, but this was too hilarious to not be posted.

Two black holes tango inside distant quasar

HOW heavy can a pair of black holes be and still tango? Try 1 billion solar masses - the combined might of two black holes circling each other at the heart of a quasar 5 billion light years away.

A quasar is a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its centre. Some quasars form when two galaxies merge, so should have two black holes at their cores. But these binary systems are far from easy to find. Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, stumbled upon one when they were sifting through a catalogue of 17,500 quasars found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The pair found two sets of broad hydrogen spectral lines in the light coming from J1536+0441, a quasar in the direction of the constellation Serpens Caput. Such signatures are caused by gas swirling into two black holes. "It doesn't smell like two ordinary quasars along the line of sight," says Lauer. "This is a good solid case of a binary black hole quasar."

The black holes weigh about 107.3 and 108.9 solar masses, and are separated by about 0.3 light years and have an orbital period of nearly 100 years.

there is also a shiny picture if you click the link.
I am (still) no physicist, but I`d say that the only black holes that tango are holes of knowledge and perception in the heads of those astronomers that dare call themselves 'scientists'!

[DustyDevil]

There's a link in the New Scientist article to the full article in Nature. Unfortunately, you have to pay to get that full article. Fortunately, the authors put the article on arXiv.org and you can download a pdf copy of it at the following link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3779

It's all about how they interpret 2 sets of broad-line emission spectra for a particular quasar. I suspect that there are other plausible interpretations for these spectra, even in the mainstream, but emission spectra is way outside my area of expertise; therefore, I cannot offer any.

Enjoy!

[earls]

Hey, lets measure some gravitational waves!

Ultra-"massive" objects, or immense charges?

Check it out Lloyd, the birth of a quasar?

If "black holes" are the death, the end all, be all, then why would they be associated with the birth of a galaxy? Seems bass-ackwards to me, no?

Immense opposite charges > Neutralization (orbit) > Matter production > Massive star (?) formation > Supernova > Nebula > Spiral Galaxy > Barred Spiral Galaxy > Globular Cluster > Until all energy is radiated away.

Anyone care to criticize/edit?

[mnemeth1]

I wrote an article about it on my web site.

http://sites.google.com/site/cosmologyq ... lack-holes

I'd love some input.

I think I got the gist of the Peratt and Arp's theories of galaxy formation down but if any one sees any glaring errors in my analysis let me know so I can correct the article.