• New discovery sheds light on very early

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Fri Feb 24 21:30:28 2023
    New discovery sheds light on very early supermassive black holes

    Date:
    February 24, 2023
    Source:
    Royal Astronomical Society
    Summary:
    Astronomers have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one
    of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. The
    discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides
    new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black
    holes.


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    FULL STORY ========================================================================== Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona
    have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy
    and the black hole at its centre provides new clues on the formation of
    the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in
    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


    ========================================================================== Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA),
    a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the
    galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is
    very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1000 times that of our own Milky
    Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar
    dust. The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star
    formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its centre.

    The black hole is considered to be a new type of primordial black hole
    -- one heavily enshrouded by cosmic "dust," causing nearly all of its
    light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic
    spectrum. The researchers have also found that this growing supermassive
    black hole (frequently referred to as an active galactic nucleus) is
    generating a strong jet of material moving at near light speed through
    the host galaxy.

    Today, black holes with masses millions to billions of times greater than
    that of our own Sun sit at the centre of nearly every galaxy. How these supermassive black holes first formed remains a mystery for scientists, particularly because several of these objects have been found when the
    Universe was very young.

    Because the 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 approximately 5% of the current age of
    the Universe.

    What is particularly astonishing about this new object is that it was identified over a relatively small patch of the sky typically used to
    detect similar objects -- less than 10 times the size of the full moon -- suggesting there could be thousands of similar sources in the very early Universe. This was completely unexpected from previous data.

    The only other class of supermassive black holes we knew about 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 tens located over the
    full 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, the 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, perhaps as a consequence of the intense star formation activity in their
    host galaxies. This is something others have been predicting for a few
    years now, 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, present-day Universe, such as Arp 299 shown
    here. In this system, two galaxies are crashing together generating an
    intense starburst as well as heavy obscuration of the growing supermassive black hole in one of the two galaxies.

    Endsley adds, "While nobody expected to find this kind of object in the
    very early Universe, its discovery takes a step towards building a much
    better understanding of how billion solar mass black holes were able to
    form so early on in the lifetime of the Universe, as well how the most
    massive galaxies first evolved."
    * RELATED_TOPICS
    o Space_&_Time
    # Black_Holes # Galaxies # Astrophysics # Astronomy #
    Stars # Cosmology # Big_Bang # Solar_System
    * RELATED_TERMS
    o Spitzer_space_telescope o Black_hole o Galaxy o
    Holographic_Universe o Galaxy_formation_and_evolution o Quasar
    o Edwin_Hubble o Black_body

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Royal_Astronomical_Society. Note:
    Content may be edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Ryan Endsley, Daniel P Stark, Jianwei Lyu, Feige Wang, Jinyi Yang,
    Xiaohui Fan, Renske Smit, Rychard Bouwens, Kevin Hainline, Sander
    Schouws. ALMA confirmation of an obscured hyperluminous radio-loud
    AGN at z = 6.853 associated with a dusty starburst in the 1.5 deg2
    COSMOS field.

    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2023; 520 (3):
    4609 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stad266 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230224135116.htm

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