Discovery of a bright quasar without a massive host galaxy

Pierre Magain (), Géraldine Letawe, Frédéric Courbin, Pascale Jablonka, Knud Jahnke, Georges Meylan and Lutz Wisotzki
Additional contact information
Pierre Magain: Université de Liège
Géraldine Letawe: Université de Liège
Frédéric Courbin: Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Observatoire
Pascale Jablonka: Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Observatoire
Knud Jahnke: Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam
Georges Meylan: Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Observatoire
Lutz Wisotzki: Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam

Nature, 2005, vol. 437, issue 7057, 381-384

Abstract: A quasar on the edge Astrophysicists may be forgiven a bout of déjà vu following the discovery of a quasar that is not at the centre of a massive host galaxy. The claim that ‘naked quasars’ had been observed caused a flurry of excitement in the mid-1990s. Quasars are among the most powerful energy sources in the Universe, and their energy is thought to derive from the infall of matter into a black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy. Quasars with no galaxy to power them seemed an anachronism and on inspection ‘naked quasars’ were nothing of the sort: the host galaxies were just hidden by the extreme luminosity of the quasars. The ‘new’ quasar is not naked, but it is not wearing much. HE0450–2958 is at the edge of a large gas cloud; if it has a host galaxy it is too small to drive the quasar, which might be feeding on mass from a nearby ultraluminous infrared galaxy with which it may be interacting. This discovery could change our ideas about how these objects form and suggests that isolated supermassive black holes may exist in the Universe.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04013 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:437:y:2005:i:7057:d:10.1038_nature04013

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature04013

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().