From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Sep 14 2005 - 18:34:16 UTC
----- Original Message -----
From: INBOX ASTRONOMY: NEWS ALERT<mailto:hst-news_at_stsci.edu>
To: public_at_stsci.edu<mailto:public_at_stsci.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 2:06 PM
Subject: BLACK HOLE IN SEARCH OF A HOME (STScI-PR05-13)
FOR RELEASE: 2:00 pm (EDT) September 14, 2005
NEWS NUGGET NO.: STScI-PR05-13
BLACK HOLE IN SEARCH OF A HOME
A team of European astronomers has used two of the most powerful
astronomical facilities available, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the
European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) at
Cerro Paranal, to find a bright quasar without a massive host galaxy.
Quasars are powerful and typically very distant sources of prodigious
amounts of radiation. They are commonly associated with galaxies
containing an active central black hole.
The team conducted a detailed study of 20 relatively nearby quasars. For
19 of them, they found, as expected, that these supermassive black holes
are surrounded by a host galaxy. But when they studied the bright quasar
HE0450-2958, located some 5 billion light-years away, they could not
find evidence for a host galaxy. This, the astronomers suggest, may
indicate a rare case of collision between a seemingly normal spiral
galaxy and a much more exotic object harboring a very massive black
hole.
The paper on HE0450-2958 will be published in the Sept. 15, 2005 issue
of Nature.
Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, Frédéric Courbin (Ecole Polytechnique Federale
de Lausanne, Switzerland) & Pierre Magain (Universite de Liege, Belgium)
For the full story, please visit:
For more information, please contact:
Frédéric Courbin, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Ecole Polytechnique
Pierre Magain, Institut d'Astrophysique de Geophysique, Universite de
Lutz Wisotzki, Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, Germany, (phone)
Lars Lindberg Christensen, Hubble European Space Agency Information
Henri Boffin, European Southern Observatory, (phone)
Ray Villard, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., (phone)
-end-
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http://hubblesite.org/news/2005/13
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0511.html
Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, (phone) +41-22-379-2418/+41-22-379-2469,
(e-mail) frederic.courbin_at_epfl.ch/pascale.jablonka_at_obs.unige.ch<mailto:frederic.courbin_at_epfl.ch/pascale.jablonka_at_obs.unige.ch>
Liege, Belgium, (phone) +32-4366-97-53, (e-mail) Pierre.Magain_at_ulg.ac.be<mailto:Pierre.Magain_at_ulg.ac.be>
+49-(0)331-7499532, (e-mail) lwisotzki_at_aip.de<mailto:lwisotzki_at_aip.de>
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410-338-4514, (e-mail) villard_at_stsci.edu<mailto:villard_at_stsci.edu>
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for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international
cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
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