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Bright galaxies are trapped in a cosmic web of gas that surrounds the SDSS quasar J103027.09 + 052455.0
IS SUN. Sidewalk
The first billion years of the universe were as chaotic as Tuesday’s first presidential debate. Galaxies were forming, gas was flowing … It was real time. While we don’t want to look back on Tuesday too often, we do like to look back in time. And, in a cosmic sense, Earth is perfectly positioned to do so. Because of the time it takes for light to travel through the universe, our telescopes can pick up the faint signals of what life was like in the early days of the universe.
On Thursday, astronomers announced the discovery of a massive and intriguing structure from when the universe was just 900 million years old. The structure, about 300 times the size of the Milky Way, contains a supermassive black hole that has trapped six nearby galaxies in a cosmic “web” of gas. It’s shedding new light on how these monstrous beasts of the early universe can grow so quickly.
In a new study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Thursday, an international collaboration of astronomers details the environment surrounding the quasar “SDSS J1030 + 0524” (J1030 for short). Quasars are incredibly bright sources of light in the sky and contain a supermassive black hole at their center surrounded by a huge disk of gas known as an “accretion disk.”
Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and telescopes in the US, astronomers examined J1030, which resides in a deep, dark corner of space. The supermassive black hole, which is a billion times more massive than our sun, is huge, and that’s unusual because it is also very young.
“This research was primarily driven by a desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects – supermassive black holes in the early Universe,” Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, said in a press release. release. Several huge black holes have been found in the early days of the universe, but astronomers have not been able to pin down what allowed them to grow to such gigantic sizes.
By studying J1030, Mignoli and his team found a series of galaxies surrounding the supermassive black hole, all intricately connected by filaments of gas. “The filaments of the cosmic web are like cobweb threads,” he explained. “The 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.”
The large structure, the team reasoned, could help feed the black hole the space food it needs to grow to such large sizes. The finding, the team suggests, provides evidence that “dark matter halos,” invisible spheres of dark matter, are key to the formation of black holes and galaxies in the early universe. It is these halos that provide a type of skeleton where matter, such as gas, accumulates. Gas flows through this invisible skeleton and eventually falls into the black hole, where it is engulfed. More gas and galaxies falling into the black hole means a bigger black hole.
Potentially many more galaxies reside in the large structure around J1030. “We think we have 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, an astronomer at the INAF and co-author of the study. ESO’s next-generation telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope, is expected to be able to observe light from faint objects in the vicinity of J1030. It is expected to go live in 2025.
