Similar types of objects have been found in the more local, present-day Universe, such as Arp 299 shown above. This is something others have been predicting for a few years now, and it’s really nice to see the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario.” Ryan Endsley, the lead author of the paper and now a Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, says “These results suggest that very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, perhaps as a consequence of the intense star formation activity in their host galaxies. The surprising discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises several questions about the abundance of very early supermassive black holes, as well as the types of galaxies in which they typically form.
#BLACK HOLE IN SPACE FULL#
These quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to COS-87259, with only a few tens located over the full sky. The only other class of supermassive black holes we knew about in the very early Universe are quasars, which are active black holes that are relatively unobscured by cosmic dust. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. In the last fifteen years or so six supernovae have popped off in the outer reaches of the galaxy, making this system a distinguished supernova factory.
As a result of this interaction, the system underwent a fierce burst of star formation. This system consists of a pair of galaxies, dubbed IC 694 and NGC 3690, which made a close pass some 700 million years ago. The researchers have also found that this growing supermassive black hole (frequently referred to as an active galactic nucleus) is generating a strong jet of material moving at near light speed through the host galaxy. The black hole is considered to be a new type of primordial black hole – one heavily enshrouded by cosmic “dust,” causing nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its center. Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array ( ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech New Discovery Sheds Light on Very Early Supermassive Black HolesĪstronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. Artist’s concept of a growing black hole seen at the center of a faraway galaxy.
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