Black Hole in Search of a Home

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, Fr?d?ric Courbin (Ecole Polytechnique
Federale
de Lausanne, Switzerland) & Pierre Magain (Universite de Liege,
Belgium)

For the full story, please visit:
http://hubblesite.org/news/2005/13
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0511.html

For more information, please contact:

Fr?d?ric Courbin, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Ecole Polytechnique
Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, (phone)
+41-22-379-2418/+41-22-379-2469,
(e-mail) frederic.courbin@xxxxxxx/pascale.jablonka@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Pierre Magain, Institut d'Astrophysique de Geophysique, Universite de
Liege, Belgium, (phone) +32-4366-97-53, (e-mail)
Pierre.Magain@xxxxxxxxx

Lutz Wisotzki, Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, Germany, (phone)
+49-(0)331-7499532, (e-mail) lwisotzki@xxxxxx

Lars Lindberg Christensen, Hubble European Space Agency Information
Centre, Garching, Germany, (phone) +49-(0)89-3200-6306, (cellular)
+49-(0)173-3872-621, (e-mail) lars@xxxxxxx

Henri Boffin, European Southern Observatory, (phone)
+49-(0)89-3200-6222, (e-mail) hboffin@xxxxxxx

Ray Villard, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., (phone)
410-338-4514, (e-mail) villard@xxxxxxxxx

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