Astronomers Uncover an Immense Black Hole at the Fringes of the Universe.
Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have recently made a fascinating discovery at the far reaches of the Universe—a rapidly growing black hole within one of the most extreme galaxies ever known. This significant finding provides valuable insights into the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes and has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The research team used data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory located in Chile, to study the galaxy dubbed COS-87259, which houses this newly found supermassive black hole. What makes this galaxy extraordinary is its star formation rate, which is an astonishing 1,000 times higher than that of our Milky Way. Additionally, it contains over a billion solar masses of interstellar dust. The galaxy’s brilliance stems from the combination of intense star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its core.
This black hole falls into the category of a novel type known as a primordial black hole. It is heavily veiled in cosmic dust, emitting most of its light in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team has also observed that this evolving supermassive black hole, often referred to as the active galactic nucleus, generates a powerful jet of material that races through its host galaxy at nearly the speed of light.
Currently, nearly every galaxy is believed to harbor black holes, ranging in mass from millions to billions of times that of our Sun. However, the process behind the formation of these supermassive black holes remains a mystery, especially since some of these objects have been detected in the early stages of the Universe. As light from such distant sources takes an immense amount of time to reach us, we see them as they existed in the distant past. In the case of COS-87259, we are observing it as it appeared just 750 million years after the Big Bang, accounting for approximately 5% of the current age of the Universe.
The most surprising aspect of this discovery is its detection in a relatively small area of the sky, less than ten times the size of the full Moon, suggesting the possibility of thousands of similar sources in the early Universe. This unexpected revelation challenges our previous understanding of such phenomena.
Up until now, quasars, which are active black holes partially obscured by cosmic dust, were the only known class of supermassive black holes in the early Universe. However, quasars at distances similar to COS-87259 are extremely rare, with only a few dozen scattered across the entire sky. The unexpected detection of COS-87259 and its black hole raises numerous questions about the prevalence of very early supermassive black holes and the types of galaxies in which they typically form.
Ryan Endsley, the lead author of the research paper and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, remarked, “These results suggest that early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, possibly due to the intense star formation activity in their host galaxies. This is something that others have been predicting for some years now, and it’s nice to see the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario.”
Similar objects have been discovered in the local Universe, such as Αrp 299, where two colliding galaxies generate an intense starburst and cause significant dimming of the growing supermassive black hole in one of the galaxies.
Endsley further added, “While no one expected to find this type of object in the early Universe, its discovery is a step towards a much better understanding of how billion-solar-mass black holes could have formed so early in the life of the Universe, as well as how the most massive galaxies first evolved.”
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