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Illustration of the galaxy called CQ4479. The extremely active black hole at the center of the galaxy consumes material so quickly that the material glows while spinning in the center of the black hole, forming a luminous quasar. Quasars create intense energy that is believed to stop any star birth and deal a fatal blow to the growth of a galaxy. But SOFIA has discovered that the galaxy CQ4479 survives these monstrous forces, retaining enough cold gas, shown on the edges in brown, to give rise to about 100 Sun-sized stars per year, shown in blue. The discovery leads scientists to rethink their theories on galactic evolution. Credit: NASA / Daniel Rutter
The hungriest black holes are believed to engulf so much surrounding material that they end the life of their host galaxy. This festive process is so intense that it creates a highly energetic object called a quasar – one of the brightest objects in the universe – as rotating matter is sucked into the black holeThe belly. Now, researchers have discovered a galaxy that survives the voracious forces of the black hole by continuing to spawn new stars – around 100 Sun-sized stars a year.
The discovery of NASAAn airplane telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, can help explain how massive galaxies came into being, even though the universe today is dominated by galaxies that no longer form stars. The results are published in the Astrophysics Journal.
“This shows us that the growth of active black holes does not stop star birth instantly, which flies in the face of all current scientific predictions,” said Allison Kirkpatrick, assistant professor at the University of Kansas at Lawrence Kansas and study co-author. . “This leads us to rethink our theories on the evolution of galaxies.”
SOFIA flies over the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains with its telescope door open during a test flight. SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft. Credit: NASA / Jim Ross
SOFIA, a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR, studied an extremely distant galaxy, located more than 5.25 billion light years away, called CQ4479. At the heart is a special type of quasar recently discovered by Kirkpatrick, called a “cold quasar”. In this kind of quasar, the active black hole still feasts on material from its host galaxy, but the intense energy of the quasar has not ravaged all of the cold gas, so stars can continue to form and the galaxy is alive. This is the first time that researchers have examined a cold quasar in detail, directly measuring the growth of the black hole, the birth rate of stars and the amount of cold gas remaining to fuel the galaxy.
“We were surprised to see another strange galaxy that defies current theories,” said Kevin Cooke, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, and lead author of this study. “If this tandem growth continues, the black hole and the stars surrounding it would triple in mass before the galaxy reaches the end of its life.
An infrared camera called High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-Plus (HAWC +), was installed at the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, in 2016. This astronomical camera takes images using far infrared light, allowing early studies of low temperature stages in the formation of stars and planets. HAWC + includes a polarimeter, a device that measures the alignment of incoming light waves. With the polarimeter, HAWC + can map magnetic fields in regions of star formation and in the environment around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These new maps can reveal how the strength and direction of magnetic fields affect the rate at which interstellar clouds condense to form new stars. A team led by C. Darren Dowell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and including participants from more than a dozen institutions developed the instrument. Credit: NASA
As one of the brightest and most distant objects in the universe, quasars, or “quasi-stellar radio sources,” are notoriously difficult to observe because they often outshine everything around them. They form when a particularly active black hole consumes huge amounts of matter from its surrounding galaxy, creating strong gravitational forces. As more and more material spins faster and faster towards the center of the black hole, the material heats up and glows intensely. A quasar produces so much energy that it often outshines everything around it, blinding attempts to observe its host galaxy. Current theories predict that this energy heats up or expels the cold gas needed to create stars, stopping the birth of stars and dealing a fatal blow to the growth of a galaxy. But SOFIA reveals that there is a relatively short period of time during which the birth of stars in the galaxy can continue as the black hole party continues to fuel the powerful forces of the quasar.
Rather than directly observing newborn stars, SOFIA used its 9-foot telescope to detect infrared light radiating from dust heated by the star-forming process. Using data collected by SOFIA’s High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-Plus, or HAWC + instrument, scientists were able to estimate the amount of star formation over the past 100 million years.
“SOFIA allows us to see in that brief window of time where the two processes can coexist,” Cooke said. “It is the only telescope capable of studying the birth of stars in this galaxy without being overwhelmed by the intensely luminous quasar.
The short window of joint growth of the black hole and the stars represents an early phase in the death of a galaxy, in which the galaxy has not yet succumbed to the devastating effects of the quasar. Continued research with SOFIA is needed to find out if many other galaxies go through a similar stage with a conjoining black hole and star growth before finally reaching the end of their lives. Future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021, could uncover how quasars affect the general shape of their host galaxies.
Reference: “Dying of the Light: An X-Ray Fading Cold Quasar at z ~ 0.405” by Kevin C. Cooke, Allison Kirkpatrick, Michael Estrada, Hugo Messias, Alessandro Peca, Nico Cappelluti, Tonima Tasnim Ananna, Jason Brewster, Eilat Glikman , Stephanie LaMassa, TK Daisy Leung, Jonathan R. Trump, Tracey Jane Turner and C. Megan Urry, November 6, 2020, Astrophysics Journal.
DOI: 10.3847 / 1538-4357 / abb94a
SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the SOFIA program, science, and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German Institute SOFIA of the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California. The HAWC + instrument was developed and delivered to NASA by a multi-institutional team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
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