Astronomers have captured the birth of a giant galaxy and a black hole
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- Astronomers have captured the birth of a giant galaxy and a black hole
An international team of astronomers has discovered a massive galaxy in the process of forming and a growing supermassive black hole in the early universe. This was reported on June 22 by the Science X news portal.
The observations were carried out using the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists have identified a compact group of at least six galaxies that are in the process of merging into a single system. The object, named TGSSJ1530+1049, is located at a distance of more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. Researchers see it as it was at a time when the age of the universe was about 1.5 billion years old.
According to the publication, the four components of the system turned out to be unexpectedly massive: hundreds of billions of solar masses of stars are concentrated in an area with a diameter of only a few tens of thousands of light-years. This makes the object one of the densest concentrations of galaxies of that period.
Roderick Overzier, co-author of the study from the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands
We call such structures protoclusters.: These are the precursors of the huge galaxy clusters that we see today. These are the places where matter began to form at the earliest stages. We believe that we are witnessing a rare moment when several massive galaxies still exist separately, but are already in the process of forming one, much larger galaxy.
Scientists emphasized that there is an active supermassive black hole in the center of this system: it was possible to study it thanks to radio interferometry. According to Kristina Gabanyi from the Laurent Etves University in Hungary, radio emission occurs when matter falls into a black hole, while some of the matter is ejected back at high speed.
The data obtained is said to indicate the relatively young age of the black hole. Astronomers emphasize the uniqueness of the discovery, as it allows us to simultaneously track the growth of a giant galaxy and the central object at its heart in a young universe.
On June 16, Popular Science magazine reported the discovery of unusual cosmic fireworks in the Messier 83 galaxy. Astronomers saw unexpected fluctuations in the brightness of X-ray radiation in objects that were thought to be fading clouds of hot gas. To explain the phenomenon, they proposed two hypotheses: the outbursts are caused by the presence of surviving companion stars or by the process of "cosmic recycling."
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