Royal Astronomical Society
Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the largest galaxies known to have arisen in the early stages of the universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center holds new clues to the formation of the first supermassive black holes. The new research is published in the monthly newsletter of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Using observations made through the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile, the research team found that the galaxy home to this new supermassive black hole, called ‘COS-87259’, has extreme values and has about a billion Suns. It found that it forms 1,000 times more stars than the Milky Way, which contains an amount of interstellar dust equivalent to the mass of . The galaxy shines remarkably because of both these intense bursts of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its centre.
THE SECRET UNDER THE DUST
The black hole has been classified as a new type of primordial black hole, densely surrounded by cosmic ‘dust’ that causes nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the researchers found that this growing supermassive black hole (often referred to as the ‘active galactic core’) is creating a powerful jet of matter traveling at nearly the speed of light in its host galaxy.
Today, almost every galaxy has black holes at its center that are millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. How these supermassive black holes first formed remains a mystery to scientists, especially since a few of these objects formed when the universe was still very young. Because the light emitted from these sources takes so long to reach us, we now see them as they were in the past; in that particular discovery, it appeared only 750 million years after the Big Bang, equivalent to about 5 percent of the current age of the universe.
What is particularly surprising about this new celestial body is that it was identified in a relatively small area of the sky that is customarily used to detect objects like this (smaller than 10 times the full moon), suggesting that there may have been thousands of such sources in the earliest stages of the Universe. This is a completely unexpected finding compared to previous data.
BRINGS NEW QUESTIONS TO THE INVENTION
The only other class of supermassive black holes we know to have formed in the earliest stages of the Universe are ‘quasars’, which are active black holes that are not fully surrounded by cosmic dust. These quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to COS-87259 and are only found in limited numbers when viewed across the entire sky. The unexpected discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises several questions about the abundance of supermassive black holes that arose in the earliest times, and the types of galaxies in which they typically occur at their centre.
Ryan Endsley, lead author of the research paper and now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, states: “The results suggest that extremely ancient supermassive black holes are likely a cause of intense star formation due to activity in their host galaxies. As a result, it often shows that it is heavily concealed by dust. This is something other scientists have predicted for several years, and it’s really nice to see the first direct observational evidence to support this scenario.”
Similar object types have been discovered in the present universe as well, which are more local, such as the ‘Arp 299’ shown above. In this system, two galaxies collide, creating an intense starburst, causing a massive obscuration of the growing supermassive black hole in one of the two galaxies.
“Never before had anyone expected to discover a celestial body like this in the early stages of the Universe,” Endsley said. This discovery is a step towards a much more accurate understanding of how a black hole with billions of solar masses could emerge so early in the Universe’s lifetime, and how the largest galaxies, as well as the Universe, evolved in the first place. carries,” he adds.
Original article Scitech Daily taken from the website. (Translated by Tarkan Tufan)
