Just 900 million years after the Big Bang, a pair of quasars have been discovered spiraling towards a massive merger, illuminating the “cosmic dawn”.
They are the first quasar The couple was detected this far back in cosmic time.
Quasars are growing rapidly supermassive black holes in the nuclei of the hyperactive galaxies. Showers of gas are pushed down the throats of black holes and remain suspended at the bottleneck of the accretion disk, a dense ring of extremely hot gas lining up to fall into the black hole. Not all of them get in; Magnetic fields wrapped in the rotating accretion disk can throw large numbers of charged particles up and beam them back into deep space in the form of two jets receding at nearly the same speed. speed of light. The jets and accretion disk combine to make the quasar appear extremely bright, even in the range of billions of stars. light years.
Because there’s something monstrous in every major galaxy black hole Like dark heat, when galaxies collide and merge, supermassive black holes eventually do the same. At the cosmic dawn, when stars and galaxies made their debut, describing the first billion years of cosmic history. expanding universe It was smaller than today, and therefore galaxies were closer together and merged more frequently. While more than 330 lone quasars have been detected so far in the universe’s first billion years, the hitherto expected abundant population of double quasars has been conspicuous by their absence.
The newly discovered double quasar was detected using J121503.42–014858.7 and J121503.55–014859.3 (called C1 and C2 by the discoverers). Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea by a team led by Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan.
Astronomers tracked spectroscopically using the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) on Subaru and the Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on the Gemini North telescope, also located on Mauna Kea.
“What we learned from GNIRS observations was that quasars are too faint to be detected in the near infrared, even with one of the largest telescopes on the ground,” Matsuoka said. expression.
Light from quasars traveling for 12.9 billion years redshift and is spread into longer wavelengths by cosmic expansion, so that light that begins as X-rays or ultraviolet ends up near the red and infrared end of the universe. electromagnetic spectrum. Light from quasars should be detectable in the near infrared, but the fact that they are faint at this wavelength means that a significant fraction of their light is actually in other wavelengths produced by advanced star formation in galaxies hosting quasars.
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Increased star formation estimated between 100 and 550 for C1 and C2 solar masses per year (compared to one to 10 solar masses per year in our country) Milky Way galaxy) is a common manifestation of galaxy mergers, as raw molecular hydrogen gas is mobilized by the interaction and triggers new stars to form.
Both black holes approached a distance of 40,000 light-years (12,000 parsecs) from each other. While this is still a long distance, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (TAKING) They found a gas bridge spanning this distance between C1 and C2 in Chile. The two black holes are already connected, and as they continue to get closer to each other, this connection will become even stronger.
The existence of C1 and C2 is further evidence of the existence of galaxies and their black holes. grew rapidlyand their enormous size and mass during the cosmic dawn challenge our models of how they should have formed. Each black hole has a mass approximately 100 million times our mass. sunwhich is huge; Spring A*The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is tiny compared to its mass of only 4.1 million solar masses. Furthermore, the total masses of the host galaxies of C1 and C2 are around 90 billion and 50 billion solar masses, respectively; This is significantly smaller than the Milky Way but still huge for the time.
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Therefore, the discovery of this double quasar and their host galaxies provides a vital data point to better understand the early universe, and specifically the reionization period, when most of the gas in the universe was ionized by radiation from the first stars, galaxies, and galaxies. quasars are ending cosmic dark ages. One of the biggest puzzles cosmology Which of these three things contributes most to reionization?
“The statistical properties of reionization-era quasars tell us many things, such as the progression 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 approximately 12.9 billion years ago. What has happened to them since then? Simulations show that eventually the two black holes will merge in an explosion. gravity waves. This will make the merged quasar even brighter and increase the star formation rate in the merged galaxy to over 1000 solar masses per year, creating one of the most extreme galaxies in the universe. Could eventually become one of the giants elliptical galaxies It is at the heart of a massive galaxy cluster such as M87 in the Virgo Cluster.
The findings were published on April 5. Astrophysics Journal LettersTogether complementary paper We discuss ALMA measurements.