by A double quasar heading for a major merger has been discovered illuminating the “cosmic beauty”, just 900 million years after the Big Bang.
They are the first quasar saw a pair so far back in cosmic time.
Quasars are growing fast supermassive black holes in the heart of hyperactivity galaxies. Torrents of gas are sent down the throats of black holes and become trapped in the belly of an accretion disk, which is a dense ring of ultrahot gas queuing to collapse into the black hole. It doesn’t all come in; Magnetic fields wrapped in the rotating accretion disk can whip up many charged particles and send them back into deep space in the form of two jets racing away almost speed of light. The jets and accretion disk together make the quasar appear extremely luminous, even across billions light year.
Since every galaxy is big monstrous black hole As its dark heat, when galaxies collide and merge, eventually so will their supermassive black holes. Back during the cosmic dawn — which describes the first billion years of cosmic history, when stars and galaxies first appeared on the scene — the an expanding universe it was smaller than it is today, and therefore galaxies were closer together and merged more often. But while more than 330 single quasars have been observed so far in the universe’s first billion years, the expected abundant population of double quasars has been characterized by their absence — until now.
The newly discovered double quasar, J121503.42–014858.7 and J121503.55–014859.3 – referred to by the discoverers as C1 and C2 – was spotted using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii by a team led by Yoshiki Matsuoka from Ehime University in Japan.
The astronomers followed up spectroscopically using the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) on Subaru and the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on the Gemini North telescope, also located atop Mauna Kea.
“What we learned from the GNIRS observations was that the quasars are too small to detect in the near-infrared, even with one of the largest telescopes on earth,” said Matsuoka in a. statement.
After traveling for 12.9 billion years, the light of the quasars is there redshifted and extended to longer wavelengths by cosmic expansion, so that light that began as X-rays or ultraviolet ends up near the red and infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light from the quasars should be detectable in the near-infrared, but because they are weak at that wavelength, a good chunk of their light is at other wavelengths produced by enhanced star formation in the galaxies that host the quasars.
Related: The Event Horizon Telescope spies jets erupting from a nearby supermassive black hole
Increased star formation, estimated to be between 100 and 550 for C1 and C2 solar masses per year (compared to 1-10 solar masses per year in our The Milky Way Galaxy), is a common symptom of galaxy mergers, as raw molecular hydrogen gas is excited by the interaction and spurred on to form new stars.
The two black holes also moved to within 40,000 light-years (12,000 parsecs) of each other. Although this is still a large area, it is observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Fomillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have found a gas bridge spanning this distance between C1 and C2. Already the two black holes are connected, and that connection will only grow stronger as they continue to close in on each other.
The existence of C1 and C2 is further evidence that galaxies and their black holes exist grew rapidly, and in great size and mass, during the cosmic dawn, challenging our models of how they should form. The mass of black holes is about 100 million times greater than ours Sunwhich is huge; Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is tiny in comparison, with a mass of just 4.1 million solar masses. In addition, the host galaxies C1 and C2 have overall masses of about 90 billion and 50 billion solar masses, respectively, although they are much smaller than the Milky Way, nevertheless gargantuan for the moment.
RELATED STORIES:
— The supermassive black hole of the M87 galaxy spews jets at near-light speed
— Vampire black hole is ‘cosmic particle accelerator’ that could solve astronomy mystery
— Quasars: Everything you need to know about the brightest objects in the universe
Therefore, the discovery of this double quasar and its host galaxies provides a critical data point for a better understanding of the early universe and in particular the reionization era, when most of the gas in the universe was ionized by radiation from the first stars, galaxies and quasars, ending the cosmic dark ages. One of the great puzzles of cosmology it is the one of those three things that contributed the most to reionization.
“The statistical properties of quasars in the reionization era tell us many things, such as the progress and origin of reionization, the formation of supermassive black holes during the cosmic dawn, and the earliest evolution of quasar host galaxies,” said Matsuoka.
We can see these two quasars as they were around 12.9 billion years ago. What has become of them since? Simulations show that the two black holes will eventually merge in a burst gravitational waves. This will make the merged quasar even more luminous and increase the rate of star formation in the merged galaxy to over 1,000 solar masses per year, creating one of the most extreme galaxies in the universe. Ultimately, he may become one of the giants elliptical galaxies at the heart of a huge cluster of galaxies, such as M87 in the Virgo Cluster.
The results were published on April 5 i The Astrophysical Journal Letterswith a companion paper discussing the ALMA measurements.
