Astronomers discover the earliest black holes at dawn of the universe

Astronomers already has far and away to look into space, back in time, the world's most powerful telescopes to detect galaxies billions of light years away that existed when the universe was only a fraction of its current age. But the discovery of massive black holes lurk constantly thought of these galaxies Central proved much more difficult.

Now a team of astronomers has discovered the earliest black holes ever detected, despite the fact that they are hidden by their host galaxies. They also measure the average growth rate of black holes, discovered that they grow, to evolve in tandem with their galaxies that astronomers observed something locally, but they knew little about when they arrived to the early universe, far away.

"This finding says we have a symbiotic relationship between black holes and galaxies that has always existed," said Kevin Schawinski Yale astronomer, contributed to the discovery.

The team used a technique called "the stack" to identify the very weak signals emitted by black holes in distant galaxies, which the main are 13 billion light years from Earth. Due to their great distance, astronomers see these black holes as they were less than one billion years after the big bang. (The universe is currently estimated to be 13.7 billion years old.)

Astronomers focused on more than 250 galaxies, which have previously been discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, which they thought were good candidates for harboring of black holes at their centers. Then they piled up several pictures taken by the Chandra Observatory at the top of each other, effectively doubling a weak x-ray signals created by black holes as they prey nearby gas and dust.

They are only detected high-energy x-rays, Schawinski said, meaning that black holes have to be hidden behind large amounts of dust and gas mglksiot to their host. "This explains why they were so hard to find," he said.

Theorists, including Yale cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan, used observations to determine the earliest black holes even those appear to grow and develop together with their host galaxies, which is similar to the astronomers have observed in the universe.

"These observations indicate that the massive black holes were already very early 700-800 million years after the big bang, which suggests that they were born or have experienced outbreaks begin massive rapid growth," said Natarajan. "One of us a lot more than we knew before, and it is very exciting."

Then, the team hopes to use the Chandra Observatory to look at a large field of vision even further so that they test theories about how these earliest black holes formed.

Other authors of the paper include Ezequiel treister (University of Hawaii, Universidad de Concepción), Marta Volonteri (University of Michigan) Eric Gawiser (Rutgers University).

The source of the story:

The above story is published materials provided by Yale University.

View the original article here