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Hidden in the deep center of galaxiesHuge, black holes lurk in the shadows and feed on matter that dares to approach. Some black holes go one step further, forming a network-like structure of galaxies, sucking gas from their captured prey to grow. even more massively in size.
Now astronomers think they have detected a one-of-a-kind incident. Six galaxies trapped in the web of an ancient black hole, at a time when the universe was in its infancy, less than a billion years old. It is so old, in fact, that this first grouping can be seen so early in the expanse of the cosmos.
The new discovery was detailed in a study published Thursday in the journal. Astronomy and Astrophysics. The data will allow scientists to better understand how these cosmic beings evolve over time and grow in size.
The team of scientists behind the new study detected this galactic cluster using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory. In total, the group extends over an area of the cosmos 300 times the size of the Milky Way.
Inside a web-like structure of gas filaments is a group of six galaxies that surround a supermassive black hole. The black hole itself is a billion times larger than the Sun.
“The filaments of the cosmic web are like cobweb threads,” Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “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 universe was formed 13.8 billion years ago. But this structure exists at a time when the universe was only 900 million years old, with its bright light traveling through billions of years to reach Earth.
“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 rapidly after the Big Bang,” Roberto Gilli said in a statement. He is also an astronomer at the INAF in Bologna and co-author of the new study.
Astronomers believe that black holes in the early universe must have grown at a much faster rate than their later counterparts, which include the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which is four million times the mass of the Sun.
But they had not been able to explain how these ancient black holes acquired so much “nutritional fuel”, or surrounding matter, to be able to reach their size in a short time.
This new observation provides one possible explanation, that these lattice-like galaxy structures contain enough gas to fuel the growth of the first black holes into a supermassive beast.
Furthermore, the researchers behind the new study believe that these structures were formed due to dark matter, the mysterious force that makes up most of the universe and holds objects together through gravitational attraction.
Dark matter in the early universe attracts large amounts of gas and could be the invisible link that holds the structure of gas filaments together.
Abstract: We report spectroscopic confirmation of a large-scale structure around the luminous quasi-stellar object (QSO) z = 6.31 SDSS J1030 + 0524, powered by a 1 billion solar mass black hole. The structure is populated by at least six members, namely four Lyman breakup galaxies (LBG) and two Lyman alpha emitters (LAE). The four LBGs were identified among a sample of 21 dropouts from band i with zAB< 25.5 selected up to projected separations of 5 physical Mpc (15 arcmin) from the QSO. Their redshifts were determined through multi-object spectroscopic observations at 8-10m class telescopes lasting up to eight hours. The two LAEs were identified in a 6hr VLT/MUSE observation centered on the QSO. The redshifts of the six galaxies cover the range between 6.129-6.355. Assuming that the peculiar velocities are negligible, this range corresponds to radial separations of ±5 physical Mpc from the QSO, that is comparable to the projected scale of the observed LBG distribution on the sky. We conservatively estimate that this structure is significant at a level > 3.5σ and that the galaxy’s overdensity level is at least 1.5-2 within the large sampled volume (∼780 physical Mpc3). The spectral properties of six-member galaxies (Lyα force and UV luminosity) are similar to those of field galaxies with similar redshifts. This is the first spectroscopic identification of an overdensity of galaxies around a supermassive black hole in the first billion years of the Universe. Our finding supports the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos (> 1012 M) in large-scale structures and that the absence of early detections of such systems is likely due to limitations. observational.
