Scientists have discovered a massive black hole that simply outgrew its galaxy. “The existence of black holes can be proven because matter is greatly accelerated by the gravitational force and thus emits particularly high-energy radiation”. Because of this remarkable disparity, the team deduced this black hole grew so quickly the host galaxy was not able to keep pace, calling into question previous thinking on the co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes. The supermassive black holes seen up to now usually make up only 0.2 to 0.5 percent of the mass of their galaxies – far less than CID-947 does. But in about 10 per cent of galaxies the central black hole is much more active, swallowing material and spitting out giant jets. The team reports its findings in the current issue of the scientific journal Science.
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Radio astronomers are watching a previously dormant black hole wake up in a dramatic display as material falls onto it for the first time in perhaps millions of years.
New York, July 10 (IANS): Challenging previous notions about the way host galaxies grow in relation to black holes, an global team of astronomers has spotted a super-sized black hole that grew much faster than its host galaxy.
The black hole theory isn’t totally blown, however. The prevailing theory is that a hole’s growth is linked to its host galaxy’s size. The result was so surprising that two of the astronomers, including Hyewon Suh from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA, had to verify the galaxy mass independently. So much energy is released in this process that the material is brightly illuminated before it disappears in the black hole and a portion of it is emitted in the form of two sharply focussed shafts of light, called jets, into outer space.
Sam Connolly, a postgraduate student at University of Southampton used X-ray astronomy to check the brightness of the source before and after the radio brightening, which helped rule out potential reasons for the brightening and to come to the conclusion that it is most likely to be a newly-awoken supermassive black hole.
Gas, dust and stars near a black hole can sit in stable orbits around the central massive object for a long time, but eventually it loses energy, spirals in, and falls onto the black hole.
These high-definition observations showed a new, extremely bright radio source exactly at the point where the supermassive black hole – was expected.
The black hole was selected from a 2011 paper published by Francesca Civano, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and CfA, as part of the Chandra Cosmic Evolution Survey. “On the other had, other data suggests that stars were still forming throughout the host galaxy”, Trakhtenbrot said. “It was quite a shock to see such a ginormous black hole”.
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Yet, their measurements show both that the black hole has a very low accretion rate (it is done growing) and that the galaxy around it is still making new stars. In fact, the galaxy could be a precursor of the most extreme, massive systems observed in today’s local universe, such as the galaxy NGC 1277 in the Perseus constellation.
