They find, near the Big Bang, a galaxy that forms stars at a rate 1,000 times higher than the Milky Way

by time news

A team of astronomers from the Universities of Texas and Arizona have discovered a large, rapidly growing black hole at the center of one of the most extreme galaxies known in the early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy, with the black hole at its center, provides new clues about the formation of the first supermassive black holes. The new work has just been published in ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’. Using the ALMA (Large Millimeter Array) radio telescope, located in the Atacama desert in Chile, the researchers determined that the galaxy, labeled COS-87259 and located just 750 million light-years from the Big Bang (when the Universe was barely 5% of its current age), is capable of forming stars at a rate 1,000 times greater than our Milky Way, and contains more than a billion solar masses in the form of interstellar dust. The speed with which it makes new suns, together with the avidity of the central black hole that accumulates around it a huge amount of fiery matter, makes the galaxy extremely bright. Due to its characteristics, the researchers believe that this black hole belongs to a completely new category. One that implies a supermassive black hole almost entirely shrouded in ‘cosmic dust’, causing almost all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team has also discovered that this rapidly growing supermassive black hole is generating a strong jet of material moving at nearly the speed of light through the host galaxy. Something that is particularly surprising about this new object is that it was identified in a portion of the sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon, much smaller than is usually used to detect similar objects. Which suggests that it could have thousands of other similar galaxies nearby. Quite a surprise for scientists. The only class of supermassive black holes known so far in the early Universe were quasars, which are active black holes that are not obscured by cosmic dust. But quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to that of COS-87259, with only a few dozen located across the entire sky. Therefore, the surprising discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises numerous questions about the abundance of very early supermassive black holes, as well as the types of galaxies in which they normally form. Ryan Endsley, lead author of the paper, states that “These results suggest that very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, perhaps as a consequence of intense star formation activity in their host galaxies. This is something that others have been predicting for years, and it’s really nice to have the first direct observational evidence to support this scenario.” MORE INFORMATION noticia No An ancient tomb of two brothers reveals that cranial surgeries were already being performed 3,500 years ago noticia Yes New secrets of Ryugu, the asteroid older than the Sun, are revealed “Although no one expected to find this type of object in the early Universe “Their discovery is a step towards a much better understanding of how black holes of billions of solar masses could have formed so early in the life of the Universe, as well as how the most massive galaxies first evolved,” Endsley concludes. .

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