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“We think we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest,” said Barbara Balmaverde of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Torino, Italy. on the discovery by astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) of six galaxies in a cosmic “cobweb” of gas that extends more than 300 times the size of the Milky Way around a supermassive black hole, those “strange galactic monsters for whom creation is destruction, death, life, order from chaos ”, at the dawn of time, when the universe was only 900 million years old.
“The Incubator” – Massive Dark Matter Halos
“The filaments of the cosmic web are like spider web threads,” explains Marco Mignoli, an INAF astronomer, about the phenomenon, supporting the theory that black holes can grow rapidly inside large web-shaped structures that contain a lot of gas to feed them. “Galaxies stay and grow where the filaments intersect, and the gas streams, available to power both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole, can flow along the filaments.”
Mignoli was the lead author of a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics summarizing a decade-long observation campaign of the black hole, which powers a quasar known as SDSS J1030 + 0524, which included the Hubble Space Telescope, the Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Southern European. in Chile, the Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona.
“Our finding supports the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large-scale structures, and that the absence of earlier detections of such structures was likely due to observational limitations.” says Colin. Norman of Johns Hopkins University, a co-author of the study, on the large regions of invisible matter that are believed to attract large amounts of gas in the early universe, forming lattice-like structures where galaxies and black holes can evolve.
Supermassive black holes: “Could actually be enigmatic dark energy objects”
“There is no good explanation for its existence”
“This research was primarily driven by a desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects – supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have not had a good explanation for their existence, ”said Mignoli.
“Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of objects so extreme, but relatively abundant, so quickly after the Big Bang,” says co-author Roberto Gilli, also an INAF astronomer in Bologna. .
The newly discovered structure offers a likely explanation for how large enough amounts of “black hole fuel” could have been available to allow these objects to grow to such enormous sizes in such a short time: the “web” and the galaxies within contain enough gas. to provide the fuel that the central black hole needs to quickly become a supermassive giant.
“Gigantic Filaments”: Supermassive Black Hole Incubators in the Early Cosmos
The galaxies that are now detected are some of the fainter that today’s telescopes can observe. This discovery required observations over several hours using the largest optical telescopes available, including ESO’s VLT. Using the MUSE and FORS2 instruments at ESO’s Paranal Observatory VLT in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the team confirmed the link between four of the six galaxies and the black hole.
Source: M. Mignoli et al. Giant’s Web: Spectroscopic Confirmation of a Large-Scale Structure Around Quasar z = 6.31 SDSS J1030 + 0524, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2020). DOI: 10.1051 / 0004-6361 / 202039045
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via ESO
Image credit: ESO
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