Just 900 million years after the Big Bang, a double quasar was discovered spiraling towards a major merger.
They are the first quasar a few seen so far back in space time.
Quasars grow rapidly supermassive black holes in hyperactive cores galaxies. Streams of gas are thrown into the throats of black holes and hang in the bottleneck of the accretion disk, a dense ring of ultrahot gas queuing up to fall into the black hole. Not everything falls into this; magnetic fields enveloped by the rotating accretion disk are capable of ejecting many charged particles and sending them back into deep space in the form of two jets speeding almost the speed of light. The combination of jets and accretion disk makes the quasar appear highly luminous, even over billions light years.
Because every great galaxy has a monster Black hole like its dark heat as galaxies collide and merge, eventually their supermassive black holes too. Back during the Cosmic Dawn—which describes the first billion years of cosmic history when stars and galaxies first appeared on the scene— the expanding universe was smaller than today, and therefore galaxies were closer together and merged more often. While over 330 single quasars have been spotted so far in the universe’s first billion years, the expected abundant population of double quasars has been notable for their absence – until now.
The newly discovered double quasar, J121503.42–014858.7 and J121503.55–014859.3 – referred to by their discoverers as C1 and C2 – was spotted using Subaru telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea by a team led by Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan.
Astronomers followed spectroscopically with the Camera and Spectrograph for Faint Objects (FOCAS) on Subaru and the Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on the Gemini North telescope, also located atop Mauna Kea.
“From the GNIRS observations, we learned that quasars are too faint to be detected in the near-infrared region, even with one of the largest telescopes on earth,” Matsuoka said. declaration.
The quasar light was 12.9 billion years away redshift and stretched to longer wavelengths by cosmic expansion, so light that started out as X-rays or ultraviolet ends up near the red and infrared ends electromagnetic spectrum. Light from quasars should be detectable in the near-infrared, but the fact that they are faint at this wavelength means that much of their light is actually at other wavelengths produced by increased star formation in the galaxies that host quasars.
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Increased star formation, estimated at 100 to 550 for C1 and C2 solar mass per year (compared to one to 10 solar masses per year in our country Milky way galaxy), is a common symptom of galaxy mergers, as raw molecular hydrogen gas is churned up by the interaction and launched to form new stars.
The two black holes also moved to within 40,000 light-years (12,000 parsecs) of each other. Although still a long distance, observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile found a gas bridge spanning this distance between C1 and C2. The two black holes are already connected, and that connection will only grow stronger as they close in on each other.
The existence of C1 and C2 is further evidence that galaxies and their black holes grew rapidlyand of immense size and mass, during the cosmic dawn era, challenging our models of how they should form. Each of the black holes has a mass of about 100 million times our mass sunwhich is huge; A* scorer, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, is small in comparison, weighing only 4.1 million solar masses. Additionally, the host galaxies C1 and C2 have a total mass in the region of 90 billion and 50 billion solar masses, respectively, which is considerably less than the Milky Way, but huge for the time.
As such, the discovery of this binary quasar and their host galaxies provides a crucial data point for a better understanding of the early universe, and in particular the reionization epoch, when most of the gas in the universe was ionized by radiation from the first stars, galaxies and quasars, ending cosmic dark ages. One of the greatest puzzles cosmology which of the three contributed the most to reionization.
“The statistical properties of quasars in the reionization epoch 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,” Matsuoka said.
We see these two quasars as they were about 12.9 billion years ago. What happened to them since then? Simulations suggest that eventually the two black holes will merge in an explosion gravitational waves. This will make the combined quasar even brighter and increase the rate of star formation in the merged galaxy to more than 1000 solar masses per year, creating one of the most extreme galaxies in the universe. He may eventually become one of the giants elliptical galaxies at the heart of massive galaxy clusters such as M87 in the Virgo cluster.
The findings were published on April 5 in The Astrophysical Journal Letterswith accompanying paper discussion of ALMA measurements.