ESO Science Release | VLT | MUSE | 2019 Dec 19
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have observed reservoirs of cool gas around some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. These gas halos are the perfect food for supermassive black holes at the centre of these galaxies, which are now seen as they were over 12.5 billion years ago. This food storage might explain how these cosmic monsters grew so fast during a period in the Universe’s history known as the Cosmic Dawn.
“We are now able to demonstrate, for the first time, that primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation,” says Emanuele Paolo Farina ... “This adds a fundamental piece to the puzzle that astronomers are building to picture how cosmic structures formed more than 12 billion years ago.”
Astronomers have wondered how supermassive black holes were able to grow so large so early on in the history of the Universe. "The presence of these early monsters, with masses several billion times the mass of our Sun, is a big mystery," says Farina ... It means that the first black holes, which might have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast. But, until now, astronomers had not spotted ‘black hole food’ — gas and dust — in large enough quantities to explain this rapid growth.
To complicate matters further, previous observations with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, revealed a lot of dust and gas in these early galaxies that fuelled rapid star formation. These ALMA observations suggested that there could be little left over to feed a black hole.
To solve this mystery, Farina and his colleagues used the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert to study quasars ... The study surveyed 31 quasars that are seen as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago ... This is one of the largest samples of quasars from this early on in the history of the Universe to be surveyed. ...
Feeding the First Supermassive Black Holes
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy | 2019 Dec 19
The REQUIEM Survey. I. A Search for Extended Lyα Nebular Emission around 31 z > 5.7 Quasars ~ Emanuele Paolo Farina et al
- Astrophysical Journal 887(2):196 (2019 Dec 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab5847
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1911.08498 > 19 Nov 2019
- Astrophysical Journal 881(2):131 (2019 Aug 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab2984
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1906.07197 > 17 Jun 2019
