Texas and Arizona researchers discovered a fast-developing black hole in one of the early Universe’s most extreme galaxies.
The finding of the galaxy and its central black hole provides new insights into the genesis of the first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices.
Extremely Early Supermassive Black Holes
Using observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory located in Chile, the team determined that the galaxy containing this new supermassive black hole, named COS-87259, is extremely extreme, forming stars at a rate one thousand times that of our own Milky Way and containing more than a billion solar masses of interstellar dust.
Both this strong rush of star creation and the expanding supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy are illuminating the galaxy. The black hole is believed to be a new sort of primordial black hole, one that is extensively obscured by cosmic dust and emits nearly all of its light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The researchers also discovered that this expanding supermassive black hole (often referred to as an active galactic nucleus) is generating a powerful material jet traveling across the host galaxy at close to the speed of light.
Nowadays, black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the Sun reside in the center of the majority of galaxies. How these supermassive black holes first originated is a mystery to astronomers, especially considering that a number of these phenomena were discovered when the universe was extremely young.
Because the light from these sources takes so long to reach us, we perceive them as if they existed in the past; in this example, nearly 5% of the current age of the universe, or 750 million years after the Big Bang.
This new item was discovered in a region of the sky generally utilized to identify similar objects less than 10 times the size of the full moon, implying that thousands of similar sources existed in the very early universe.
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Collision Of Two Galaxies
At distances comparable to COS-87259, these quasars are extremely rare, with only a few tens spread over the entire sky. The unexpected discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises a number of issues regarding the prevalence of extremely early supermassive black holes and the types of galaxies in which they are normally formed.
Ryan Endsley, the paper’s senior author and a Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, says, Our results show that very early supermassive black holes were frequently hidden by dust, possibly as a result of the tremendous star formation activity in their host galaxies.
It’s incredibly exciting to have the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario, which has been predicted by others for several years.
Comparable types of objects, such as Arp 299, have been discovered in the more local, contemporary universe. Two galaxies are colliding in this system, causing an explosive starburst and heavy obscuration of the expanding supermassive black hole in one of the galaxies.
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