Black holes have been around since the start of the universe, and, in fact, some 30 million of them came into existence when the universe was 1 billion years old, according to a new study.
"We found evidence for the existence of a very large number of massive black holes in the early universe when it was less than a billion years old. We performed this study in the Chandra Deep Field South," Ezequiel Treister, a University of Hawaii astrophysicist and lead author of the study, told a Washington news conference.
Along with their "host galaxies," young black holes grew faster than originally thought, a statement from NASA said.
"This detection of X-rays from these galaxies is very important because it tells us that there are super massive black holes growing in them," Treister said.
Using Chandra to examine a section of the sky for six weeks, astronomers observed what is known as "Chandra Deep Field South."
They then combined imagery from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope with data obtained from Chandra to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies.
"What we have seen are baby black holes in very young galaxies at the dawn of the universe. As you will see in the next figure, these black holes are feeding on material, gas, at the centre of these galaxies and they will continue to grow through their adolescence to adulthood," Kevin Schawinski, an astrophysicist with Yale University and co-author of the report, said.
Between 30 and 100 per cent of these galaxies contain "growing supermassive black holes," NASA said. Until now, young black holes had been predicted but not observed.
"This discovery was enabled by two of NASA's great observatories, Chandra and Hubble. They make an excellent team and we have only just scratched the surface of the first billion years of the universe with their help and there are great prospects for further discoveries in the coming years with the help of these two great space observatories," Schawinski said.
Read more and see the video at The Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment