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The lives of galaxies can be extended if their supermassive black holes provide them with “hearts and lungs” to support their “breathing” and prevent them from growing too large.
That’s the suggestion from new research that suggests the universe would have aged much faster and would today be filled with “zombie” galaxies containing dead or dying stars if not for the supermassive black holes thought to sit at the heart of all the great galaxies. The astrophysicists behind the findings compare jets of gas and radiation that blow supermassive black holes from their poles to the airways that feed our lungs.
The University of Kent team thinks that pulses from each black hole’s “core” cause shocks that oscillate back and forth across the two jets. This is similar to how a part of our body called the diaphragm moves up and down within our chest cavity to inflate and deflate our lungs.
In galaxies, this act of respiration transmits the energy of supermassive black jets that are blown into the surrounding medium, as on a cold winter morning you can breathe warm air into colder air. Stars form when clouds of interstellar gas cool and are allowed to condense. That means this “breathing” can slow star formation, limiting the growth of galaxies.
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The team reached this conclusion after analyzing simulations designed to replicate the potential impact of supermassive black-blowing jets in preventing the growth of galaxies. The simulations showed that the heart of a supermassive black hole can Pulse, creating high pressure in the jets – almost like a person suffering from high blood pressure, or “Hypertension.”
When this happened, the team saw the jets begin to act like a bell, sending sound waves that descended through the surrounding material of galactic gas and dust.
“We realized that the jets had to have some way to support the body – the surrounding gas of the galaxy – and that’s what we found in our computer simulations,” team member Carl Richards, Ph.D. student at the University of Kent, said in a statement. “The unexpected behavior was revealed when we analyzed the high-pressure computer simulations and let the heart beat.”
This sent a stream of pulses into the high-pressure jets, which changed shape as a result of the action of the bumps on the shock faces of the oscillating jet. The researcher added that these jets expanded “like lungs filled with air.” In doing so, they sent pressure ripples into the galactic material around them, stopping the growth of galaxies in the simulations.
Away from the team’s simulations, there is some other evidence of this phenomenon in real galaxies. For example, about 240 million light years from Earth in the Perseus galaxy cluster, astronomers have evidence of large gas bubbles in this collection of thousands of galaxies immersed in a huge cloud of multimillion-degree gas. These are believed to be the result of sound waves traveling through the galactic medium in this cluster.
Achieving the balance between black hole activity and the flow of gas into galaxies is extremely difficult — however, because supermassive black holes require a steady supply of gas and dust to create jets.
“Breathing too fast or too slow will not provide the life tremors needed to maintain the galactic medium and, at the same time, fuel the heart,” said University of Kent staff member and researcher Michael Smith in the statement. “However, this is not easy to do, and we have constraints on the type of pulse, the size of the black hole, and the quality of the lungs.”
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The team concluded that a galaxy’s lifespan can be extended with the help of its supermassive black hole “heart” and the black hole’s “lungs” blowing from its core while inhibiting growth by limiting the amount of gas that falls in in the stars from an early stage. .
Without this mechanism, many galaxies would have exhausted their supplies of fuel needed for star formation in our 13.8 billion year old Universe. As a result, they would have “fizzled out,” and most galaxies are like “red and dead” zombie galaxies as they are called at this point, filled with ancient burned stars.
The team’s research is published on July 12 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
