One of the fundamental questions in astronomy is how the universe came to be. Sagittarius A*, the 4 million solar mass SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, is one of the most common features that astronomy has noted. Excess energy is released from the black holes when they swallow up gas, dust, and stars. A quasar is a phenomenon where the center of a galaxy surpasses the stars in the disk.
An international team of astronomy led by the European Southern Observatory discovered a galaxy in the early Universe that could shed light on the evolution of the universe. They were able to observe a swarm of galaxies in the early Universe using the Very Large Telescope and the ALMA. These observations show how bright galaxies grow and evolve into quasars and emit powerful jets of light.
The leader of the research was a research fellow with the European Southern Observatory. He was joined by researchers from the National Institute for Astrophysics, the Cavendish Laboratory, the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Their paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Quasars were named because they looked like stars but shone brightly in the radio spectrum. The term is used to describe black holes that consume a lot of gas, dust, and stars. There are still many unanswered questions about how the universe transitions from being normal to quasars. One of the most massive and gas-rich galaxies seen in the early Universe was examined by Ginolfi and his colleagues.
The universe was about 1 billion years old when it was located around 12 billion light-years away. Dust is heated by a black hole and stars surrounding it, making it so bright. The designation of "hot dust-obscured galaxies" is due to the fact that they look particularly bright in the IR. In a recent press release, Ginolfi explained.
“Before evolving into a full-blown quasar, some galaxies are thought to go through a phase of being very dusty, and very ‘active’ in terms of star formation and accretion of gas onto their central, supermassive black holes. We set out to design an experiment to learn more about this transition phase.”
The data obtained by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope allowed them to study a region 40 times larger than the galaxy itself. They used archival data from the ALMA array to measure the internal motion of the gas. Peter Laursen is a researcher with the Cosmic Dawn Center and a co-author on the study.
According to the observations, there is a swarm of 24 smaller galaxies surrounding W0410-0912. The MUSE instrument allows us to measure both their position on the sky and their distance along our line of sight. We can measure their positions.
The average Universe is at least 10 times denser. Hot dogs are thought to live in dense environments. When the Universe was about a quarter of a century old, W0410-0913 was ten times the size of our galaxy. It would take a lot of feed material to feed a black hole to reach this level of brightness.
It's consistent with established theories about how massive galaxies grow by merging with satellites. The research team thought that it would be subject to interactions and mergers with other galaxies at a very high rate. The interior of the galaxy was expected to be chaotic. They were surprised when the ALMA observations showed that W0410-0913 did not seem to have been disturbed by its neighbors.
The ALMA observations showed that gas and stars were rotating in an orderly fashion around the central black hole, and that it moved at an incredible rate of speed. I said that.
The results from the two different telescopes show a picture of how the most massive and dusty galaxies may evolve. A vital stage in the transition from a dusty and star-forming galaxy to a quasar can grow in dense environments. Despite the expected frequent merging with other galaxies, these interactions are not necessarily destructive, as they feed the central galaxy and whirl up the gas a bit. A bit like throwing pebbles against a piece of glass, but not breaking it.
The observations show how the early Universe evolved into what is seen today. The first clues about the processes that drive the evolution of hot DOGs are provided by this. The galaxies that were gathered using the VLT and ALMA can still interact with their friends. There will be many opportunities for follow-up observations of this and other early galaxies in the future.
The successor to the Hubble, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in the year 2027. The ELT is one of the telescopes that will join the VLT and ALMA. New insight into Dark Matter, Dark Energy and more comprehensive models of Cosmic evolution are expected to be provided by knowing the intricacies of how evolved galaxies.
Neils Bohr Institute is a nature institute.
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