Giant Galaxy Surrounding the Most Distant Black Hole Ever Discovered at Edge of the Observable Universe
Scientists have spotted a giant galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. Detecting this huge galaxy (the same size as the Milky Way) was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on.
The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun
"It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun. The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe," said University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto who discovered the object.
The first, "How can a galaxy be giant when it's the same size as our own?", is because of lightspeed - the galaxy is almost thirteen billion light-years away, which means it's almost thirteen billion years ago, which is almost as much "ago" as there is. When the universe was only about a billion years old even a Milky Way sized galaxy was pretty big, and the supermassive black hole in the center was impressively huge.
Which brings us to the second issue: light coming from a black hole. Everyone knows that nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light, but that's only after matter passes the "event horizon" - the ultimate one-way sign in spacetime. But as matter falls in towards this cut-off point it's heated up by friction, radiating energy away as light, and this emission from infalling matter makes up over half of all the light detected from the distant galaxy. This is why we didn't see it before - a little thing like a few hundred billion stars was outshone by the superheated material around the black hole.
Detection was made possible by newly upgraded CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) Cameras fitted to the Suprime-Cam in the Hawaiian Mauna Kea observatory. The improvement was engineered by Professor Satoshi Miyazaki and colleagues of the National Observatory of Japan.
The new early-stage black hole-galaxy system will be an important clue in the evolution of such supermassive black holes. While asking how they get so big might sound simple (they just keep eating stuff, including each other), their ability such spectacular size in so short a time isn't explained by any current creation theories. And by "spectacular size" me mean about a giga-Sun of mass.
Yet another reminder of the amazing: our amazing ability to detect such incredibility, and the amazing universe where such awe-inspiring objects can be lost down the back of the cosmological sofa until we look really hard.
Luke McKinney
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~tomo/QSOhost/QSOhost_v7.pdf
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Professor Satoshi Miyazaki and colleagues of the National Observatory of Japan.
University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues
have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black
hole ever found. n.
Dr. Goto stated, "It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed
when the Universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that
it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun.
The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early
universe."
Knowledge of the host galaxies of supermassive black holes is
important in order to understand the long-standing mystery of how
galaxies and black holes have evolved together. Until now, studying
host galaxies in the distant universe has been extremely difficult
because the blinding bright light from the vicinity of the black hole
makes it more difficult to see the already faint light from the host
galaxy.
Unlike smaller black holes, which form when a large star dies, the
origin of the supermassive black holes remains an unsolved problem. A
currently favored model requires several intermediate black holes to
merge. The host galaxy discovered in this work provides a reservoir
of such intermediate black holes. After forming, supermassive black
holes often continue to grow because their gravity draws in matter
from surrounding objects. The energy released in this process
accounts for the bright light that these black holes produce.
To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new
red-sensitive CCDs installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru
telescope on Mauna Kea. Prof. Satoshi Miyazaki of the National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is lead investigator for the
creation of the new CCDs and a collaborator on this project. He said,
"The improved sensitivity of the new CCDs has brought an exciting
discovery as its very first result."
A careful analysis of the colors revealed that 40 percent of light around 9100Angstrom
is from the host galaxy itself and 60 percent is
from the surrounding ionized nebulae illuminated by the black hole.
Yousuke Utsumi (Graduate University for Advanced Studies /NAOJ), a member of the project team,
said, "We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host
galaxy forming together. This discovery has opened a new window for
investigating galaxy-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the universe."
Dr. Goto is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (JSPS). He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in
2003 and has also worked at Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins
universities, and at the Institute of Space and Astronautical
Science, a part of JAXA, the Japanese equivalent of NASA. He came to
UH Institute for Astronomy in 2008 to work with Dr. David Sanders on
quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) and luminous infrared galaxies.
Other members of the research team are Dr. Hisanori Furusawa (NAOJ) and
Dr. Yutaka Komiyama (NAOJ).
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~tomo/QSOhost/QSOhost_v7.pdf
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