Scientists saw 14 black holes at the heart of the galaxy devouring matter from outer space.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Scientists have revealed new photos of the Spiderweb galaxy protocluster. The photo reveals the amount black hole very high active supermassive.
Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory collected over eight days showed that, in the volume of space surveyed, scientists saw 14 black holes at the heart of galaxies, including the Spiderweb galaxy at the center of the protocluster, greedily devouring matter from outer space around them.
Reported from Sciencealert, Sunday (3/4/2022), this is a much higher level than other similar volumes. This suggests that up to a quarter of the most massive galaxies in baby clusters are bound by actively growing black holes.
The Spiderweb protocluster, named after the Spiderweb galaxy at its center, is a growing group of galaxies whose light has traveled 10.6 billion light years to reach us. This galaxy originates from the cosmic time period known as the ‘Cosmic Noon’ – a brief period of about two to three billion years after the Big Bang during which the galaxy formed stars at a rapid rate.
By now, spiderweb clusters should have evolved into massive, stable, gravitationally bound galaxy clusters.
Studying such a cluster while it is still in the early stages of formation will yield insights into the evolution of the structure universe large scale. It could also tell us more about the processes that influence the rate of star formation and the activity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in members of galaxy clusters.
However, scientists don’t really know how galaxy clusters evolve. So it’s hard to tell which cluster is the original protocluster, and which is unlikely to change. For that reason, scientists are looking for interesting unusual targets that display activity linked to evolution, confirmed across a wide range of wavelengths.
Chandra’s observations of the Spiderweb protocluster are part of this process. When an SMBH actively accumulates material, the process injects energy known as “feedback” into the surrounding galaxy, which in turn has a major impact on star formation.
A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Paolo Tozzi of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy pointed a telescope at the cluster to look for signs of X-ray emission from the supermassive black hole. Although black holes themselves do not emit light, accretion is so energetic that it sends high-energy light blazing across the Universe.
This is what the team detected. In a region of space about 11.3 million light-years across, the 14 galaxies in the protocluster are seen emitting X-rays, indicating that their SMBHs are active.
This is much higher than other similar space samples of the same epoch, with the same mass range of galaxies. Scientists found that 25 percent of the most massive galaxies in the protocluster could have active supermassive black holes. That number is five to 20 times higher than the other samples.
This could have interesting implications for our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow, as well as influencing the formation and evolution of galaxies. These findings suggest that there is something specific in the Spiderweb protocluster environment that triggers the activity of the supermassive black hole.
It is not clear what these environmental factors are. It is possible that gravitational interactions between the galaxies displace the matter, sweeping it towards the galactic center where it can be devoured by the black hole. Another possibility, the researchers say, is that the protocluster has somehow retained a large amount of cold gas, which would have been easier for the black hole to accrue than the hot gas we see in nearby galaxy clusters or perhaps a combination of factors is at play.
Data from instruments that can see at different wavelengths, including the Hubble Space Telescope, will help shed light on this mystery.
“By exploiting the multiwavelength datasets available in the Spiderweb field, we plan to further explore the properties of X-ray protocluster members to investigate the main physical mechanisms responsible for triggering X-ray emission,” they write in their paper.
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