Scientists from the Universities of Texas and Arizona have detected a fast-growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the early Universe.
Finding the galaxy and the black hole at its center reveals fresh information on the genesis of the first supermassive black holes. The findings of the new paper, titled "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," was published in the Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices.
Discovery Sheds Light on Supermassive Black Holes
The team determined that the galaxy containing this new supermassive black hole is the COS-87259 galaxy, SciTech Daily reports. It is very extreme in the sense that stars form at a rate 1000 times that of the Milky Way and contain over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust.
They gathered this information using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory located in Chile. This rapid rush of star creation, as well as the expanding supermassive black hole at its center, illuminates the galaxy.
The black hole is thought to be a new sort of primordial black hole, which is densely veiled by cosmic "dust," emitting virtually all of its light in the mid-infrared area of the electromagnetic spectrum. The researchers also discovered that this expanding supermassive black hole is creating a powerful jet of material that travels at near-light speed across the host galaxy.
Currently, black holes with masses millions to billions of times than the Sun may be found in the heart of practically every galaxy. Nonetheless, scientists are still puzzled as to how these supermassive black holes evolved, especially because some of them were discovered when the Universe was extremely young.
Since the light from these sources takes so long to reach Earth, they are often viewed as they were in the past. In this example, just 750 million years after the Big Bang, or about 5% of the Universe's present age.
This new cosmic object is remarkable since it was discovered across a very tiny piece of sky generally utilized to identify comparable things that are less than 10 times the size of the full moon, implying that there might be thousands of such sources in the very early Universe. It was indeed absolutely unexpected based on the prior data.
New Questions for Future Studies
The surprising discovery of the COS-87259 galaxy and its black hole raises several issues about the occurrence of extremely early supermassive black holes and the types of galaxies from which they typically form, Tech Explorist reports.
Ryan Endsley, the senior author of the study and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that the results show that very early supermassive black holes were highly covered with dust that might be due to tremendous star formation activity in their host galaxies. Although others may have predicted this before, the study is the first direct observational data that confirms it.
He added that its discovery contributes to a better understanding of how billion solar mass black holes formed early in the history of the universe even though no one anticipated finding this object in the very early cosmos.
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