Quasars from galaxy collisions with naked black holes

Motivated by a set of new Hubble Space Telescope observations by Bahcall and collaborators, we propose that the universe contains a substantial independent population of supermassive black holes and that QSOs are a phenomenon that occurs when they collide with galaxies or gas clouds in the intergalactic medium. We argue that this new model is not in conflict with any available constraints and would also naturally explain one puzzle for the conventional model, the very rapid QSO population decline toward low redshift. The hypothesis therefore bears further investigation.