2005/10/28 by E. M. Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, Burbidge, E. M. +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #History and Developments in Astronomy #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0510815
openalex publication_date 2005/10/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is shown that there are at least 21 QSOs within 1 degree of the nearby active spiral galaxy NGC3079. Many of them are bright (mag<18) so that the surface density of those closer than 15 arc minutes to the galaxy centre is close to 100 times the average in the field. The probability that this is an accidental configuration is shown to be less or equal to one in a million. Discovery selection effects and microlensing fail by a large factor to explain the phenomenon, suggesting that the QSOs may lie in the same physical space as NGC3079. However, two of them make up the apparently lensed pair 0957+561A, B whose lensing galaxy lies at z=0.355. This problem is discussed in the concluding section.