One of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early universe has a rapidly expanding black hole, according to astronomers from the University of Texas and Arizona. The discovery of a galaxy and a black hole at its center reveals new information about the formation of the first supermassive black holes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society published the new research.
The team found that the galaxy, known as COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way and containing interstellar dust weighing more than a billion solar masses. It was discovered through observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory located in Chile.
Burst Of Star and Growing Supermassive Black Hole
The galaxy shines brightly both from this intense burst of star formation and from the growing supermassive black hole at its center. The black hole is thought to be a new type of primordial black hole – it is heavily shrouded in cosmic ‘dust’, causing almost all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Scientists also found that this growing supermassive black hole (often referred to as an active galactic nucleus) generates a powerful jet of material moving at near the speed of light through the host galaxy.
Today, at the center of nearly every galaxy are black holes millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. How these supermassive black holes first formed remains a mystery to scientists, especially since several of these objects were found when the universe was very young. Because light from these sources takes so long to reach us, we see them as they existed in the past; in this case, just 750 million years after the big bang, which is about 5 percent of the current age of the universe.
What’s particularly surprising about this new object is that it was identified in a relatively small patch of sky typically used to detect similar objects – less than 10 times the size of the full Moon – suggesting that there could be thousands of similar ones very close by resources. early universe. This was completely unexpected from previous data.
The only other class of supermassive black holes we know of in the very early universe are quasars, which are active black holes that are relatively unobscured by cosmic dust. These quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to COS-87259, with only a few dozen found in the entire sky. The surprising discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises several questions about the abundance of very early supermassive black holes, as well as the types of galaxies in which they typically form.
Ryan Endsley, lead author of the paper and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, says: “These results suggest that very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, possibly as a result of intense star-forming activity in their host galaxies. This is something that others have been predicting for several years, and it’s really nice to see the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario.”
Similar types of objects have been found in the more local universe today, such as Arp 299, shown here. In this system, two galaxies collide, generating an intense starburst as well as a strong obscuration from a growing supermassive black hole in one of the two galaxies.
Endsley adds: “While no one expected to find this kind of object in the very early universe, its discovery is a step towards building a much better understanding of how billions of solar-mass black holes could have formed so early in the universe’s life.” and also how the most massive galaxies first evolved.”
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