The first gigantic black hole storm ever discovered – The supermassive black hole is a telltale sign of the ancient history of the universe

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered a titanic galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole 13.1 billion years ago. This is the oldest surviving example of such a wind to date and is a telltale sign that huge black holes have had a profound effect on the growth of galaxies since the very beginning of the Earth. history of the Universe.

At the center of many large galaxies is a supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times larger than the Sun. Interestingly, the mass of the black hole is roughly proportional to the mass of the central region (bulge) of the galaxy in the nearby Universe. At first glance, it might seem obvious, but it’s actually very strange. The reason is that the sizes of galaxies and black holes differ by about ten orders of magnitude. Based on this proportional relationship between the masses of two objects of such different size, astronomers believe that galaxies and black holes have grown and evolved together (coevolution) through some kind of physical interaction.

A galactic wind can provide this type of physical interaction between black holes and galaxies. A supermassive black hole swallows a large amount of matter. When this matter begins to move at high speed due to the gravity of the black hole, it emits intense energy, which can push surrounding matter outward. This is how the galactic wind is created.

“The question is, when did the galactic winds appear in the Universe? Says Takuma Izumi, lead author of the research paper and researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). “This is an important question because it is linked to an important problem in astronomy: how did galaxies and supermassive black holes co-evolve? “

The research team first used the NAOJ’s Subaru telescope to search for supermassive black holes. Thanks to its wide-field observation capability, they found more than 100 galaxies with supermassive black holes in the Universe more than 13 billion years ago.^[1]

Next, the research team used ALMA’s high sensitivity to study the movement of gas in galaxies that host black holes. ALMA observed a HSC galaxy J124353.93 + 010038.5 (hereafter J1243 + 0100), discovered by the Subaru telescope, and picked up the radio waves emitted by dust and carbon ions in the galaxy.^[2]

ALMA image of the distant galaxy J1243 + 0100 hosting a supermassive black hole in its center. The distribution of calm gas in the galaxy is shown in yellow and the distribution of the high speed galactic wind is shown in blue. The wind is located in the center of the galaxy, indicating that the wind is being driven by the supermassive black hole. Credit: ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO), Izumi et al.

A detailed analysis of the ALMA data revealed that there is a high speed gas flow moving at 500 km per second in J1243 + 0100. This gas flow has enough energy to push stellar matter back into the galaxy and stop star-forming activity. The gas flow found in this study is truly a galactic wind, and it is the oldest observed example of a galaxy with a huge galactic-sized wind. The previous record holder was a galaxy about 13 billion years ago, so this observation pushes back the start of 100 million years.

The team also measured the motion of the silent gas at J1243 + 0100 and estimated the mass of the galaxy’s bulge, based on its gravitational equilibrium, to be about 30 billion times that of the Sun. The mass of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, estimated by another method, was about 1% of it. The mass ratio of the bulge to the supermassive black hole in this galaxy is almost identical to the mass ratio of black holes to galaxies in the modern Universe. This implies that the coevolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies has been occurring less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe.

“Our observations support recent high-precision computer simulations which predicted that co-evolving relationships were in place even around 13 billion years ago,” comments Izumi. “We plan to observe a large number of such objects in the future and hope to clarify whether the primordial coevolution seen in this object is an accurate picture of the General Universe at this time.”

Remarks

1. For more information, please see the article Scientists Discover 83 Quasars Powered by Supermassive Black Holes. The number of galaxies with supermassive black holes discovered was 83 at the time of this announcement, but the number of discoveries has now grown to over 100.
2. The redshift of this object is z = 7.07. Using the cosmological parameters measured with Planck (H0 = 67.3km / s / Mpc, m = 0.315, Λ = 0.685: Planck 2013 results), we can calculate the distance to the object at 13.1 billion years- light. (Please refer to “Express the distance to distant objects“for details.)

Further information

Reference: “Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). XIII. Large-scale feedback and star formation in a low-light quasar at z = 7.07 on the mass relationship between the local black hole and the host ”by Takuma Izumi, Yoshiki Matsuoka, Seiji Fujimoto, Masafusa Onoue, Michael A. Strauss, Hideki Umehata, Masatoshi Imanishi, Kotaro Kohno, Toshihiro Kawaguchi, Taiki Kawamuro, Shunsuke Baba, Tohru Nagao, Yoshiki Toba, Kohei Inayoshi, John D. Silverman, Akio K. Inoue, Soharashi, Kazushi Iwasawaikawaikawa, Nobunawa, Nobunawa Takuya Hashihiro Naoshimoto, Kouichiro Naoshimoto, Kouichiro Naoshimoto Malte Schramm, Chien-Hsiu Lee and Hyewon Suh, June 14, 2021, Astrophysics Journal.
arXiv: 2104.05738

These observation results are presented as Takuma Izumi et al. “Subaru High-z Exploration of Low Light Quasars (SHELLQ). XIII. Large-scale feedback and star formation in a low-light quasar at z = 7.07 ”, in June 14, 2021.

This research was supported by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (No. JP20K14531, JP17H06130, 1146 JP17H01114, JP19J00892), the Leading Initiative for Excellent Young Researchers, MEXT, Japan (HJH02007), NAOJ ALMA Scientific Research Grant (2017-06B, 2020-16B), Spanish MICINN (PID2019-10GB-C33 and “Unit of Excellence María de Maeztu 2020-2023” awarded to ICCUB (CEX2019-000918-M)), National Science Foundation of China (11721303, 11991052, 11950410493, 12073003), National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0400702), European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant scheme (ConTExt project, Grant No. 648179), Independent Research Fund Denmark grant DFF – 7014-00017, and the Foundation national research under grant n ° 140.