Astronomers find six Galaxies around a SMBH when Universe 1 Billion years old:

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by paddoboy, Oct 1, 2020.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    https://phys.org/news/2020-10-large-telescope-galaxies-web-supermassive.html

    Very Large Telescope spots galaxies trapped in the web of a supermassive black hole:

    With the help of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the centre of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.

    "This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objectssupermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence," said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

    The new observations with ESO's VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic "spider's web" of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. "The cosmic web filaments are like spider's web threads," explains Mignoli. "The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments."

    more at link..............

    the paper:

    https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2020/10/aa39045-20/aa39045-20.html

    Web of the giant: Spectroscopic confirmation of a large-scale structure around the z = 6.31 quasar SDSS J1030+0524:

    Abstract

    We report on the spectroscopic confirmation of a large-scale structure around the luminous z = 6.31 quasi-stellar object (QSO) SDSS J1030+0524, powered by a one billion solar mass black hole. The structure is populated by at least six members, namely, four Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs), and two Lyman alpha emitters (LAEs). The four LBGs were identified among a sample of 21 i-band dropouts 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 8−10 m class telescopes lasting up to eight hours. The two LAEs were identified in a 6 h 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 level of the galaxy overdensity is at least 1.5−2 within the large volume sampled (∼780 physical Mpc3). The spectral properties of the six member galaxies (Lyα strength and UV luminosity) are similar to those of field galaxies at similar redshifts. This is the first spectroscopic identification of a galaxy overdensity around a supermassive black hole in the first billion years of the Universe. Our finding lends support to the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive (>1012 M⊙) dark matter halos in large-scale structures and that the absence of earlier detections of such systems is likely due to observational limitations.

     

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