A team of astronomers made a groundbreaking discovery of six closely bound galaxies being powered by a single supermassive black hole with a mass greater than a billion solar masses at a redshift of 6.31. Out of the six galaxies, four are massive star-forming galaxies and the other two are comparatively low mass galaxies. This is the first discovery of a galactic overdensity around a supermassive black hole in the first billion years of the Universe and confirms the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large scale structures.
MS 0735.6+7421: Six objects ranging in location from within the Milky Way to billions of light-years away: Source: Chandra |
Theoretical models strongly argue that supermassive black holes should form and grow within the most massive dark matter halos in the early Universe where they find suitable physical conditions and sufficiently large reservoirs of gas to form and grow. Such overdense regions should trigger frequent mergers between galaxies and would lead to the formation of large scale structures with sizes of millions of light-years. However, there has been no conclusive observational evidence of such large scale structures surrounding a supermassive black hole in the early Universe.
The new discovery marks the first observational confirmation of a large scale structure around a supermassive black hole in the first billion years of the Universe. The study has been accepted for publication as a letter on Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Article Information: M. Mignoli et al., "The web of the Giant: spectroscopic confirmation of a Large Scale Structure around the z=6.31 quasar SDSS J1030+0524", arXiv:2009.00024
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