From astrowatch.net: “Discovery in the Early Universe Poses Black Hole Growth Puzzle”

Astro Watch

Quasars are luminous objects with supermassive black holes at their centers, visible over vast cosmic distances. Infalling matter increases the black hole mass and is also responsible for a quasar’s brightness. Now, using the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii, astronomers led by Christina Eilers have discovered extremely young quasars with a puzzling property: these quasars have the mass of about a billion suns, yet have been collecting matter for less than 100,000 years.

Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA

Conventional wisdom says quasars of that mass should have needed to pull in matter a thousand times longer than that – a cosmic conundrum. The results have been published in the May 2 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.

Artists’ impression of a quasar: black hole (center) surrounded by a hot accretion disk, with two jets consisting of extremely fast particles perpendicularly to the disk. Credit: J. Neidel / MPIA

Within the heart of every massive galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. How these black holes formed, and how they have grown to be as massive as millions or even billions of suns, is an open question. At least some phases of vigorous growth are highly visible to astronomical observers: Whenever there are substantial amounts of gas swirling into the black hole, matter in the direct vicinity of the black hole emits copious amount of light. The black hole has intermittently turned into a quasar, one of the most luminous objects in the universe.

Now, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have discovered three quasars that challenge conventional wisdom on black hole growth.

Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

These quasars are extremely massive, but should not have had sufficient time to collect all that mass. The discovery, which is based on observations at the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii, glimpses into ancient cosmic history: Because of their extreme brightness, quasars can be observed out to large distances. The astronomers observed quasars whose light took nearly 13 billion years to reach Earth. In consequence, the observations show these quasars not as they are today, but as they were almost 13 billion years ago, less than a billion years after the big bang.

The quasars in question have about a billion times the mass of the sun. All current theories of black hole growth postulate that, in order to grow that massive, the black holes would have needed to collect infalling matter, and shine brightly as quasars, for at least a hundred million years. But these three quasars proved to be have been active for a much shorter time, less than 100,000 years. “This is a surprising result,” explains Christina Eilers, a doctoral student at MPIA and lead author of the present study. “We don’t understand how these young quasars could have grown the supermassive black holes that power them in such a short time.”

To determine how long these quasars had been active, the astronomers examined how the quasars had influenced their environment – in particular, they examined heated, mostly transparent “proximity zones” around each quasar. “By simulating how the light from quasars ionizes and heats gas around them, we can predict how large the proximity zone of each quasar should be,” explains Frederick Davies, a postdoctoral researcher at MPIA who is an expert in the interaction between quasar light and intergalactic gas. Once the quasar has been “switched on” by infalling matter, these proximity zones grow very quickly. “Within a lifetime of 100,000 years, quasars should already have large proximity zones.”

Surprisingly, three of the quasars had very small proximity zones – indicating that the active quasar phase cannot have set in more than 100,000 years earlier. “No current theoretical models can explain the existence of these objects,” says Professor Joseph Hennawi, who leads the research group at MPIA that made the discovery. “The discovery of these young objects challenges the existing theories of black hole formation and will require new models to better understand how black holes and galaxies formed.“

The astronomers have already planned their next steps. “We would like to find more of these young quasars,“ says Christina Eilers, “While finding these three unusual quasars might have been a fluke, finding additional examples would imply that a significant fraction of the known quasar population is much younger than expected.” The scientists have already applied for telescope time to observe several additional candidates. The results, they hope, will constrain new theoretical models about the formation of the first supermassive black holes in the universe – and, by implication, help astronomers understand the history of the giant supermassive black holes at the center of present-day galaxies like our own Milky Way.

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From UCSC: “Ripples in cosmic web measured using rare double quasars”

UC Santa Cruz

[PREVIOUSLY COVERED HERE .]

April 27, 2017
Julie Cohen
stephens@ucsc.edu

Astronomers identified rare pairs of quasars right next to each other on the sky and measured subtle differences in the absorption of intergalactic atoms measured along the two sightlines. This enabled them to detect small-scale fluctuations in primeval hydrogen gas.(Credit: UC Santa Barbara)

Snapshot of a supercomuter simulation showing part of the cosmic web, 11.5 billion years ago. The researchers created this and other models of the universe and directly compared them with quasar pair data in order to measure the small-scale ripples in the cosmic web. The cube is 24 million light-years on a side. © J. Oñorbe / MPIA

The most barren regions of the universe are the far-flung corners of intergalactic space. In these vast expanses between the galaxies, a diffuse haze of hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang is spread so thin there’s only one atom per cubic meter. On the largest scales, this diffuse material is arranged in a vast network of filamentary structures known as the “cosmic web,” its tangled strands spanning billions of light years and accounting for the majority of atoms in the Universe.

Now a team of astronomers including J. Xavier Prochaska, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, has made the first measurements of small-scale ripples in this primeval hydrogen gas. Although the regions of cosmic web they studied lie nearly 11 billion light years away, they were able to measure variations in its structure on scales a 100,000 times smaller, comparable to the size of a single galaxy. The researchers presented their findings in a paper published April 27 in Science.

Intergalactic gas is so tenuous that it emits no light of its own. Instead astronomers study it indirectly, by observing how it selectively absorbs the light coming from faraway sources known as quasars. Quasars constitute a brief hyper-luminous phase of the galactic life-cycle, powered by the infall of matter onto a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. They thus act like cosmic lighthouses—bright, distant beacons that allow astronomers to study intergalactic atoms residing between the quasars location and Earth.

Because these hyper-luminous episodes last only a tiny fraction of a galaxy’s lifetime, quasars are correspondingly rare on the sky, and are typically separated by hundreds of millions of light years from each other. In order to probe the cosmic web on much smaller scales, the astronomers exploited a fortuitous cosmic coincidence: they identified exceedingly rare pairs of quasars, right next to each other on the sky, and measured subtle differences in the absorption of intergalactic atoms measured along the two sightlines.

“One of the biggest challenges was developing the mathematical and statistical tools to quantify the tiny differences we measure in this new kind of data,” said Alberto Rorai, a post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge university and lead author of the study. Rorai developed these tools as part of the research for his doctoral degree, and applied his tools to spectra of quasars obtained by the team on the largest telescopes in the world, including the 10-meter Keck telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The astronomers compared their measurements to supercomputer models that simulate the formation of cosmic structures from the Big Bang to the present.

“The input to our simulations are the laws of physics and the output is an artificial universe which can be directly compared to astronomical data. I was delighted to see that these new measurements agree with the well-established paradigm for how cosmic structures form,” said Jose Oñorbe, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who led the supercomputer simulation effort. On a single laptop, these complex calculations would have required almost a thousand years to complete, but modern supercomputers enabled the researchers to carry them out in just a few weeks.

“One reason why these small-scale fluctuations are so interesting is that they encode information about the temperature of gas in the cosmic web just a few billion years after the Big Bang,” said Joseph Hennawi, a professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara who led the search for quasar pairs.

Astronomers believe that the matter in the universe went through phase transitions billions of years ago, which dramatically changed its temperature. These phase transitions, known as cosmic reionization, occurred when the collective ultraviolet glow of all stars and quasars in the universe became intense enough to strip electrons off of the atoms in intergalactic space. How and when reionization occurred is one of the biggest open questions in the field of cosmology, and these new measurements provide important clues that will help narrate this chapter of the history of the universe.

Telescopes in this study:

Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA

ESO/VLT at Cerro Paranal, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level

Carnegie 6.5 meter Magellan Baade and Clay Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile.

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Shane Telescope at UCO Lick Observatory, UCSC

Lick Automated Planet Finder telescope, Mount Hamilton, CA, USA

The University of California, Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

Lick Observatory’s Great Lick 91-centimeter (36-inch) telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch) UCSC Lick Nickel telescope

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by UC Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

UCSC alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument. (Photo by Laurie Hatch)

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will be fully operational by early summer and will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

The NIROSETI team also includes Geoffrey Marcy and Andrew Siemion from UC Berkeley; Patrick Dorval, a Dunlap undergraduate, and Elliot Meyer, a Dunlap graduate student; and Richard Treffers of Starman Systems. Funding for the project comes from the generous support of Bill and Susan Bloomfield.

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UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

From phys.org: “Astronomers discover 16 new high-redshift quasars”

phys.org

March 14, 2017
Tomasz Nowakowski

The color track of quasar at z = 5 to 6 (red dots and line) with a step of ∆z = 0.1, generated by calculating the mean colors of simulated quasars at each redshift bin. The contours show the locus of M dwarfs, from early type to late type. The cyan contours denote M1-M3 dwarfs, the orange contours denote M4-M6 dwarfs and the purple contours denote M7-M9 dwarfs. Clearly, z ∼ 5.5 quasars are serious contaminated by late type M dwarfs. Credit: Yang et al., 2017.

Using a new color selection technique, astronomers have detected 16 new luminous, high-redshift quasars. The discovery could be very important for understanding of the early universe, as such high-redshift, quasi-stellar objects provide essential clues on the evolution of the intergalactic medium, quasar evolution and early super-massive black hole growth. The findings were presented in a paper published Mar. 10 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

High-redshift quasars (at redshift higher than 5.0) are very difficult to find using conventional color selections. This is due to their low spatial density and high contaminants from cool dwarfs. Among more than 300,000 quasars discovered to date, only 290 of them are at redshift higher than 5.0. The scientific community is especially interested in high-redshift quasars at redshift between 5.3 and 5.7, due to their optical colors, which are similar to those of late-type stars. Only about 30 such objects have been found so far.

With the aim of filling this gap of known quasars at redshift ranging from 5.3 to 5.7, a team of astronomers led by Jinyi Yang of the Peking University in Beijing, China, has developed a new optical/infrared color selection technique. The method is based on optical, near-infrared and mid-infrared photometric data from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), UKIRT InfraRed Deep Sky Surveys – Large Area Survey (ULAS), VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) and NASA’s Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

SDSS Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, NM, USA

UKIRT, located on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i, USA as part of Mauna Kea Observatory

NASA/WISE Telescope

The method has proved its worth as the researchers were able to find 16 new luminous, high-redshift quasars at redshift within the desired range. The observations were carried out between October 2014 and November 2015.

“In this paper, we report initial results from a new search that focuses on the selection of z ~ 5.5 quasars,” the team wrote.

Among the newly discovered quasi-stellar objects, J113414.23+082853.3 is the one with the highest redshift – at 5.69. This quasar also showcases strong Lyman-alpha emission and strong intergalactic medium absorption blueward of Lyman-alpha line.

Another interesting new quasar found by the researchers is J152712.86+064121.9 (at 5.57). It is a weak line quasar with a very weak Lyman-alpha emission line and no other obvious emission features. However, the team revealed that its redshift was measured by matching the continuum to template; thus, its redshift uncertainty is a little larger than others.

The scientists underline the importance of their research, noting that it could help us better understand the evolution of quasars at redshift from 5.0 to 6.0, over the post-reionization epoch.

“The physical conditions of the post-reionization intergalactic medium, at z ~ 5-6, provides the basic boundary conditions of models of reionization, such as the evolution of intergalactic temperature, photon mean free path, metallicity and the impact of helium reionization. They place strong constraints on reionization topology as well as on the sources of reionization and chemical feedback by early galaxy population,” the paper reads.

The team now plans to publish another paper in which a broader sample of high-redshift quasars will be presented. This study will also include the data from the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey (UHS), Pan-STARRS PS1 Survey and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) ATLAS.

Pan-STARRS1 located on Haleakala, Maui, HI, USA

ESO VST telescope, at ESO’s Paranal Observatory

See the full article here .

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From Kavli: “Will a New Discovery Fast-track Our Understanding of the Origins of Galaxies and Gargantuan Black Holes?”

The Kavli Foundation

Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge

Mar 10, 2017
Adam Hadhazy

Thanks to a record haul of new, ultra-distant quasars—powerhouses of light from the farthest reaches of the universe—astrophysicists can now piece together the rise of mighty objects in the early cosmos.

THE DISCOVERY OF MORE THAN 60 QUASARS—stupendously bright regions in the cores of galaxies, powered by gargantuan black holes—is a windfall for astrophysicists probing the early universe. At more than 13 billion light-years away, these quasars rank among the farthest objects ever glimpsed by humans.

An artist’s iconic impression of an extremely bright quasar. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

That’s important because they take us way back in time, to the first billion years after the Big Bang, and may help explain how the first galaxies and supermassive black holes arose. Guided by their light, astrophysicist hope to understand how the universe transitioned from a dark, featureless expanse into a rich, starry realm loaded with luminous galaxies.

The Kavli Foundation recently spoke with three astrophysicists about how this haul of ultra-distant quasars will transform what we know about the early universe.

The participants were:

ROBERTO MAIOLINO – is a professor of experimental astrophysics at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge (KICC). He studies distant quasars to learn about how galaxies and black holes have evolved together throughout cosmic history.
LINHUA JIANG – is the Youth Qianren Research Professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University. An author of two recent studies that discovered dozens of new and extremely distant quasars, Jiang is interested in how the first galaxies changed the universe hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
MARTA VOLONTERI – is research director at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. A theorist, she is the principal investigator of the BLACK project, which investigates how supermassive black holes formed and influenced their host galaxies, especially as quasars, in the early universe.

The following is an edited transcript of their roundtable discussion. The participants have been provided the opportunity to amend or edit their remarks.

THE KAVLI FOUNDATION: Before we talk about the new discovery, what is a quasar and why do you find them so fascinating?

ROBERTO MAIOLINO: Quasars are the cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes gobbling up matter at a high rate. These black holes have masses typically exceeding one million times that of our Sun. The process of consuming matter radiates a lot of energy as light. In fact, most quasars are so bright, they outshine their host galaxy by a large factor. Most quasars are also very far away, and the ones we are particularly interested in are those that developed when the universe was young—less than a billion years old.

You can think of quasars as lighthouses in the dark of the early universe. Just as a lighthouse’s beam might shine on nearby land forms, making them visible from far away, quasars enable us to investigate the very distant universe and understand the physics of primordial galaxies. We think that quasars indicate special regions in the early universe where matter is particularly dense. As the cosmos developed, these so-called overdense regions probably ended up being populated by a large number of galaxies. So quasars help us to learn about these sites of galaxy formation. We also believe that quasars are tightly connected with the evolution of their young, host galaxies.

MARTA VOLONTERI: I’m interested in whether quasars can illuminate the origins of supermassive black holes, which can possess less than a million to several billions of times the mass of the Sun. Black holes exist in the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way, but we don’t know how they got there.

LINHUA JIANG: What makes distant quasars so interesting to me, as an observational astronomer, is that they are very difficult to find.

TKF: And we now have twice as many of these lighthouses in deep space to observe. Why is that important?

MAIOLINO: Until now, we have only had a chance to study a few ultra-distant quasars. What those can teach us about the nature of quasars, and more broadly about the general state of the cosmos long ago, is highly limited. With the newly discovered quasars, we will be able to gauge the variety of these monstrously powerful objects in the universe and how they affect their host galaxies.

JIANG: Echoing what Roberto just said, now that we have a much larger sample of quasars than ever before, roughly 200, we can study them to learn about their individual variation and how they collectively influenced the primordial cosmos.

TKF: The more quasars, the merrier, right?

MAIOLINO: Exactly.

TKF: Quasars were identified in the early 1960s, and yet the tally remains pretty small compared to the hundreds of billions of galaxies known to exist in our universe. Why are quasars so difficult to find?

MAIOLINO: Quasars are typically so far away, we generally only see them as point-like sources of light through our telescopes—the same as we see stars. That’s how these objects got their name—“quasars,” for “quasi-stars.” We didn’t know these objects were inside other galaxies, and not just stars, until we measured the light coming from them, which showed they were very far away. The identification of quasars, especially the very distant ones, generally require extensive observing campaigns with large telescopes. Luminous distant quasars are also very rare, hence finding them among the plethora of other celestial objects is often a difficult process.

TKF: So finding quasars depends heavily on building increasingly powerful and sensitive telescopes?

JIANG: Yes. To find the most distant quasars, which are not as bright as closer quasars, you really need telescope surveys that take images across a very large part of the sky. My colleagues and I used both the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Pan-STARRS survey to find the quasars that we recently reported. Before those surveys began, we really knew very little about distant quasars.

DSS Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, NM, USA

Pan-STARRS1 located on Haleakala, Maui, HI, USA

TKF: And while quasars have been hard to find in the past, do you expect this to change?

JIANG: Yes. With the next generation of telescopes, we should find many more quasars.

VOLONTERI: We are probably seeing just the tip of the iceberg. We know that small objects are more common in the universe than big things. We see this when it comes galaxies, stars, planets . . . really everything else! We would therefore expect there to be a lot more quasars out there that are smaller and fainter. Also, the luminosity of the quasars we’ve detected is extremely high, so we are probably only seeing the brightest outliers. That means we are studying quasars with a very limited range of properties.

TKF: Roberto, you mentioned earlier that quasars outshine their host galaxies. How does all this energy affect their host galaxies?

MAIOLINO: Quasars can “kill” themselves and their galaxies by completely cleaning out a galaxy’s gas content. This happens because they drive some of the most powerful outflows of gas in the universe that we’ve ever seen, and when they do, they remove the fuel available for star formation.

VOLONTERI: Right. A quasar dumps so much energy into a host galaxy that it can influence how often stars form.

TKF: As for black holes, what do quasars reveal about them, and why is this important?

VOLONTERI: Knowing more about the black holes powering quasars will allow us to know more about how galaxies develop, and knowing about the evolution of galaxies allows us to trace the universe’s history overall. That’s why finding more quasars to study is so fundamental.

MAIOLINO: Observations have shown us that a significant fraction of these primordial black holes is extremely massive. In the local universe, black holes typically have masses of only one-thousandth of their host galaxy. But in the distant, early universe, we now know some black holes can reach masses close to 10 percent of that of their host galaxy. That’s amazing and this tells us that in the early universe, black holes overtake galaxies in terms of forming and growing. Only later in the universe’s history do the galaxies catch up. So observations are already giving us some indications about the early evolutionary path of our universe.

JIANG: A mystery, though, is that there does not seem to have been enough time for the universe to have grown these supermassive black holes, given how early in cosmic history we begin to see them as quasars. So for a supermassive black hole formation scenario to be right, it has to account for that rapid growth.

TKF: Shifting gears here, let’s talk about a period in the history of the universe when it literally went from dark to light. Linhua, what role do we think the earliest quasars had in this transformation?

JIANG: The idea is still controversial, but quasars may have provided the energy that fueled a change in the gas between the galaxies, allowing light to pass through it. That turning point, when the universe was roughly a billion years old, is known as the “epoch of reionization.” It happened when neutral atoms of hydrogen gas became ionized, which is how they had originally been when the universe began in a hot, dense state. The question is, how and why did this happen? Ionization takes a lot of energy. What were the cosmic sources of the high-energy light that drew the universe out of the so-called dark ages, the era before the first stars and galaxies formed? Could quasars be the answer? At the moment, that seems unlikely because there are so few quasars known. But, as Marta said earlier, we are probably seeing only the tip of the quasar iceberg. There could be a lot more that we haven’t seen yet.

VOLONTERI: We have recently made a theoretical breakthrough that will help us figure out how much of a role quasars played in the epoch of reionization. We can now accurately monitor radiation inside of our computer simulations as galaxies evolve. We should soon be able to count how many light particles can leave a galaxy and start ionizing extragalactic gas, which I think is really awesome.

TKF: Looking ahead, what are some of the projects and missions that could help us find even more quasars and better characterize them?

MAIOLINO: I expect that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, will greatly expand our numbers of distant quasars using visible light, when it opens in 2022.

LSST/Camera, built at SLAC


LSST telescope, currently under construction at Cerro Pachón Chile, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes.

If we want to look even further back on time, before the epoch of reionization, then we need to use infrared light. The prime surveys for doing that will both be space-based. One is called EUCLID, launching in 2020, and the other is WFIRST, launching in the mid 2020s.

ESA/Euclid spacecraft

NASA/WFIRST

I’d expect these missions to deliver very distant galaxies and quasars and to help detect quasars hidden by cosmic dust.

JIANG: Once we find new candidates, we have to confirm them as quasars by looking for chemical signatures in the light observations using a method called spectroscopy. It is very costly to allocate the time on telescopes to take the long observations we need to do spectroscopy. But we will do it, because it allows us to learn a lot about the properties of quasars.

MAIOLINO: Right. We will want to investigate the physical properties of distant quasars even better than we can do now. The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and a few other next-generation facilities, like the Thirty Meter Telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope will enable us to scrutinize what’s happening in the quasars’ host galaxies and with their supermassive black holes.

NASA/ESA/CSA Webb Telescope annotated

TMT-Thirty Meter Telescope, proposed for Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA

Giant Magellan Telescope, Las Campanas Observatory, to be built some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile

ESO/E-ELT,to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile

TKF: What mysteries about quasars do you still hope to answer?

MAIOLINO: Observations of the earliest quasars show that their host galaxies are already enriched with huge amounts of heavy elements, such as iron, as well as cosmic dust, small particles that are ejected into space when the stars die. This enrichment process takes time—many hundreds of millions of years.

Yet, we see these distant galaxies, illuminated by quasars, when the age of the universe was less than one billion years. That suggests that everything in these early galaxies with quasars seems to be going on at a much faster rate than any other galaxies that we know of in the universe, and we don’t know why.

I’m confident that upcoming observations will shed a lot of light on these amazing objects.

JIANG: Studying distant quasars will help us gauge the “clumpiness” of gas in the spaces between the galaxies. We’ll learn more about the early history of galaxies and how the cosmos got its shape, so to speak.

VOLONTERI: As we’ve said, 200 distant quasars is only the tip of the iceberg. We still don’t know about the broader population of quasars and how they can explain the growth of black holes in galaxies, so we need more data.

See the full article here .

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The Kavli Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, is dedicated to the goals of advancing science for the benefit of humanity and promoting increased public understanding and support for scientists and their work.

The Foundation’s mission is implemented through an international program of research institutes, professorships, and symposia in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience, and theoretical physics as well as prizes in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.

From astrobites: “How long do quasars shine?”

Astrobites

Title: Statistical detection of the He II transverse proximity effect: evidence for sustained quasar activity for > 25 million years
Authors: Tobias M. Schmidt, Gabor Worseck, Joseph F. Hennawi, J. Xavier Prochaska, Neil H. M. Crighton
First Author’s Institution: MPIA, Heidelberg, Germany

Status: Submitted to ApJ, open access

In the deep center of every massive galaxy, extremely massive but invisible black holes reign supreme. How these supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grew to boast of their 107-109 Msun masses still eludes us today. These massive beasts are awakened when surrounding matter spirals in and falls into them, creating active galactic nuclei (AGN) as luminous as our Milky Way.

UCSB

In this state, they spew out radiation from the radio to the X-rays. When the accretion of matter is particularly high, the AGN becomes very luminous and is called a quasar. (Here is a handy guide on AGN taxonomy.)

We believe that part of the reason SMBHs grow so massive is that they are fed by a voluminous amount of accreting material during the bright quasar phase. Even if some SMBHs appear dormant (i.e. no accretion of matter), it is believed that they must have gone through at least one quasar period in the past. Thus the quasar lifetime can shed light on the growth and evolution of SMBHs. Current estimates of the quasar lifetime are not very tight — they span a couple of orders of magnitudes from 106 to 108 years. These assume that black holes go through the quasar phase once, although it is possible that a black hole undergoes multiple quasar outbursts. Multiple episodic lifetimes would then sum up to the net quasar lifetime.

This paper examines the episodic lifetime of quasars using singly-ionized helium (He II) as the probe. At redshift z~3, most of the Helium in the Universe is singly-ionized. The last electron in He II can be knocked free by the powerful radiation from quasars. As a quasar ionizes its surrounding He II, one can imagine a sphere of ionized He II around the quasar that expands outward with the ionizing radiation. The longer the quasar shines, the larger this sphere becomes.

What happens when there is a foreground quasar at almost the same redshift close to a background quasar? In this case, when light from the background quasar passes through the ionized He II sphere of the foreground quasar, it will not be absorbed by the He II near the foreground quasar, since the He II would already be ionized (by the foreground quasar). On Earth we see an increased flux transmission in the spectrum of the background quasar, at the ionization wavelength of He II. This is known as the proximity effect. We’re particularly interested in the transverse proximity effect, which is the proximity effect across the plane of the sky.

To find this, the authors carried out an intensive imaging and spectroscopic campaign in the vicinity of 22 background quasars at z~3 with 4m- and 8m-class telescopes including the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the New Technology Telescope (NTT).

Large Binocular Telescope, Mount Graham, Arizona, USA

ESO/VLT at Cerro Paranal, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level

ESO/NTT at Cerro La Silla, Chile

They ended up with a final sample of 66 foreground quasars, the largest that has ever been used in such studies. There were multiple foreground quasars near any one background quasar. The authors first searched for the proximity effect in individual background quasars (an example is shown in Figure 1), but failed to detect any signal. But don’t lose heart, as stacking the spectra can reveal the hidden signal.

Fig. 1 – Spectra of four background quasars in this study, where the stars mark the locations of the foreground quasars. Values on top indicate the rate at which the foreground quasars emit ionizing photons. The spectra had been truncated to only focus on foreground quasars with high ionizing radiation. The transverse proximity effect appears as a spike at the location of the stars relative to the continuum. Except for the lower right panel, none of the spectrum here and in the rest of the sample indicates strong proximity effect. [Figure 6 in paper]

The authors stacked their spectra at the positions of foreground quasars whose ionizing radiation passes a certain cut — this gives them an average He II transmission profile, as shown in Figure 2. The stacked profile shows a clear transmission spike with 3σ significance. In order to ionize the He II gas, the quasar had to shine for at least the transverse light-crossing-time between the foreground and background quasar. The authors stacked quasar spectra for a range of transverse separations from the background quasar. The maximum separation where the proximity effect persists gives a lower limit on the quasar lifetime. The proximity effect is found to persist up to > 25 mega light years for their sample, translating to a minimum 25 Myr for the quasar lifetime.

Fig. 2 – Stacked spectra of foreground quasars whose ionizing radiation passes a certain cut (indicated top left). The red line indicates the position of the foreground quasars, where an increase in He II transmission can be seen. The thin black line is an estimate of the mean He II spectrum in the intergalactic medium, while the bottom panel shows the number of foreground quasars that are used in the stacking process. [Figure 7 in paper]

Since the authors ran out of foreground quasars at larger separations and implemented a cut on the quasar ionizing radiation, the intrinsic quasar lifetime could actually be longer than 25 Myr. To probe longer lifetimes, one would need a larger sample of foreground and background quasars. More sophisticated modeling would also provide richer interpretation of the data beyond a simple lifetime constraint. In any case, this study is the first to be able to detect the proximity effect in any ion (previous studies have detected the proximity effect in neutral Hydrogen). It also places stronger constraints on the episodic lifetime of quasars than any past studies of the same nature.

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From EarthSky: “Today in science: Quasar mystery solved” A Fascinating Look Back to February 5, 1963

EarthSky

February 5, 2017
Deborah Byrd

Maarten Schmidt via CalTech

February 5, 1963. On this date, Caltech astronomer Maarten Schmidt solved a puzzle about the quasi-stellar radio source 3C273 that changed the way we think about our universe.

X-ray image of 3C273 and its jet. Today, this quasar is known to lie at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy. Image via Chandra X-ray Observatory.

This object appeared starlike, like a point of light, with a mysterious jet. But its spectrum – the range of wavelengths of its light – looked odd. Astronomers routinely use spectra to learn the composition of distant objects. But, in 1963, emission lines in the spectrum of 3C273 didn’t appear to match any known chemical elements. Schmidt had a sudden realization that 3C273 contained the very ordinary element hydrogen. He realized that the spectral lines of hydrogen appeared strange because they were highly shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Such a large red shift could occur if 3C273 were very distant, about three billion light-years away.

Dr. Schmidt told EarthSky that he recognized immediately the implications of his revelation. He said:

“This realization came immediately: my wife still remembers that I was pacing up and down much of the evening”

The implications were just this. To be so far away and still visible, 3C273 must be intrinsically very bright and very powerful. It’s now thought to shine with the light of two trillion stars like our sun. That’s hundreds of times the light of our entire Milky Way galaxy. Yet 3C273 appears to be less than a light-year across, in contrast to 100,000 light-years for our Milky Way.

So 3C273 is not only distant. It is also exceedingly luminous, implying powerful energy-producing processes unknown in 1963. Schmidt announced his revelation about quasars in the journal Nature on March 16, 1963.

Today, hundreds of thousands of quasars are known, and many are more distant and more powerful than 3C273. It’s no exaggeration to say they turned the science of astronomy on its ear. Why, for example, are these powerful quasars located so far away in space? Because light travels at a finite speed (186,000 miles per second), we are seeing distant objects in space in the distant past. In other words, quasars existed in early universe. They do not exist in our time. Why?

In the 1960s, 3C273 and other quasars like it were strong evidence against the Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory, which suggested that matter is continuously being created as the universe expands, leading to a universe that is the same everywhere. The quasars showed the universe is not the same everywhere and thus helped usher in Big Bang cosmology.

Timeline of the universe. A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of “inflation” produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe.
Date circa 2006
Author NASA/WMAP Science Team

ESA/Planck supercedes WMAP

21 March 2013
ESA’s Planck satellite has delivered its first all-sky image of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), bringing with it new challenges about our understanding of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. The image has provided the most precise picture of the early Universe so far.

But Steady State theory had been losing ground, even before 1963. The biggest change caused by Maarten Schmidt’s revelation about the quasar 3C273 was in the way we think about our universe.

In other words, the idea that 3C273 was extremely luminous, and yet occupied such a relatively small space, suggested powerful energies that astronomers had not contemplated before. 3C273 gave astronomers one of their first hints that we live in a universe of colossal explosive events – and extreme temperatures and luminosities – a place where mysterious black holes abound and play a major role.

According to a March 2013 email from Caltech:

In 1963, Schmidt’s discovery gave us an unprecedented look at how the universe behaved at a much younger period in its history – billions of years before the birth of the sun and its planets. Later, Schmidt, along with his colleague Donald Lynden-Bell, discovered that quasars are galaxies harboring supermassive black holes billions of light-years away – not stars in our own galaxy, as was once believed. His seminal work dramatically increased the scale of the observable universe and advanced our present view on the violent nature of the universe in which massive black holes play a dominant role.

What are quasars? Astronomers today believe that a quasar is a compact region in the center of a galaxy in the early universe. The compact region is thought to surround a central supermassive black hole, much like the black hole thought to reside in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy and many (or most) other galaxies. The powerful luminosity of a quasar is thought to be the result of processes taking place in an accretion disk, or disk of material surrounding the black hole, as these supermassive black holes consume stars that pass too near.

ULAS J1120+0641, farthest quasar known as of 2011. The quasar appears as a faint red dot close to the center. Composite image created from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey, via Wikimedia Commons.

SDSS Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, NM, USA

UKIRT, located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA as part of Mauna Kea Observatory

The Chinese-born U.S. astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu coined the name quasar in May 1964, in the publication Physics Today. He wrote:

So far, the clumsily long name ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’ is used to describe these objects. Because the nature of these objects is entirely unknown, it is hard to prepare a short, appropriate nomenclature for them so that their essential properties are obvious from their name. For convenience, the abbreviated form ‘quasar’ will be used throughout this paper.

Today, the farthest known quasar is ULAS J1120+0641. Its co-moving distance is 28.85 billion light-years.

Bottom line: On February 5 1963, astronomer Maarten Schmidt’s flash of inspiration led to the understanding that quasi-stellar radio sources, or quasars, exist in the very distant universe. Quasars became the most distant, and most luminous, objects known. They changed the way we think about the universe.

See the full article here .

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From Carnegie: “Discovery nearly doubles known quasars from the ancient universe”

Carnegie Institution for Science

An artist’s rendering of a very distant quasar courtesy of ESO/M. Kornmesser.

Quasars are supermassive black holes that sit at the center of enormous galaxies, accreting matter. They shine so brightly that they are often referred to as beacons and are among the most-distant objects in the universe that we can currently study. New work from a team led by Carnegie’s Eduardo Bañados has discovered 63 new quasars from when the universe was only a billion years old. (It’s about 14 billion years old today.)

This is the largest sample of such distant quasars presented in a single scientific article, almost doubling the number of ancient quasars previously known. The findings will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

“Quasars are among the brightest objects and they literally illuminate our knowledge of the early universe,” Bañados said.

But until now, the population of known ancient quasars was fairly small, so scientists’ ability to glean information from them was limited. One of the main challenges is finding these distant quasars, which are extremely rare. Scientists have searched for them for decades, but the effort is comparable to finding a needle in a haystack.

The quasars discovered by Bañados and his team will provide valuable information from the first billion years after the Big Bang, which is a period of great interest to astronomers.

Why?

The universe was created in the Big Bang and hot matter exploded everywhere. But then it cooled off enough for the first protons and electrons to form and then to coalesce into hydrogen atoms, which resulted in a dark universe for a long time. It wasn’t until these atomic nuclei formed larger structures that light was able to shine once again in the universe. This happened when gravity condensed the matter and eventually formed the first sources of illumination, which might have included quasars.

There is still a lot about this era when the universe’s lights were turned back on that science doesn’t understand. But having more examples of ancient quasars will help experts to figure out what happened in those first billion years after the Big Bang.

“The formation and evolution of the earliest light sources and structures in the universe is one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy,” Bañados said. “Very bright quasars such as the 63 discovered in this study are the best tools for helping us probe the early universe. But until now, conclusive results have been limited by the very small sample size of ancient quasars.”

The coming years will see a great improvement in what we know about the early universe thanks to these discoveries.

This work was funded by a Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship, the European Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and a NASA Hubble Fellowship

This work include data obtained from the following facilities: PS1 (GPC1), VLT:Antu (FORS2), NTT (EFOSC2), LBT (MODS), Max Planck:2.2m (GROND), Magellan:Baade (FIRE), Magellan:Clay (LDSS3), Keck:I (LRIS), Hale (DBSP), CAO:3.5m (Omega2000), CAO:2.2m (CAFOS), MMT (SWIRC), Du Pont (Retrocam).

Pann-STARRS1 Telescope, on Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii

ESO VLT, Cerro Paranal, Chile, with new laser for guide stars

ESO NTT at Cerro La Silla, Chile

Large Binocular Telescope, Mount Graham, Arizona, USA

MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope at La Silla, Chile

Carnegie 6.5 meter Baade and Clay Magellan Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile

Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA

Caltech Palomar 200 inch Hale Telescope, at Mt Wilson, CA, USA

MMT Telescope at the summit of Mount Hopkins near Tucson, Arizona, USA

Carnegie Las Campanas Dupont telescope, Atacama Desert, Chile

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Andrew Carnegie established a unique organization dedicated to scientific discovery “to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research, and discovery and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind…” The philosophy was and is to devote the institution’s resources to “exceptional” individuals so that they can explore the most intriguing scientific questions in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Carnegie and his trustees realized that flexibility and freedom were essential to the institution’s success and that tradition is the foundation of the institution today as it supports research in the Earth, space, and life sciences.

6.5 meter Magellan Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile

From Hopkins: “Far fewer stars are born due to intense radiation from quasars, researchers say”

Johns Hopkins University

3.23.16
Arthur Hirsch

Quasar. ESO/M. Kornmesser

Research led by Johns Hopkins University scientists has found new, persuasive evidence that could help solve a long-standing mystery in astrophysics: why did the pace of star formation in the universe slow down some 11 billion years ago?

Scientists have puzzled for years over the question of why galaxies slowed their star-making pace to what astronomers estimate is now 30 times slower than their peak pace 11 billion years ago. The chief suspect has been the feedback process from quasars within galaxies, where stars are born. A paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society presents evidence that intense radiation and galaxy-scale winds emitted by the quasars—the most luminous objects in the universe—heats clouds of dust and gas, preventing them from cooling to form more dense clouds and eventually stars.

“I would argue that this is the first convincing observational evidence of the presence of quasar feedback when the universe was only a quarter of its present age, when the cosmic star formation was most vigorous,” said Tobias Marriage, an assistant professor in the university’s Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics & Astronomy. While the findings are not conclusive, Marriage said, the evidence is very compelling and has scientists excited. “It’s like finding a smoking gun with fingerprints near the body but not finding the bullet to match the gun.”

Investigators looked at information on 17,468 galaxies and found a tracer of energy known as the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect. The phenomenon, named for the two Russian physicists who predicted it nearly 50 years ago, appears when high-energy electrons disturb the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB.

Cosmic Microwave Background per ESA/Planck

ESA/Planck

The CMB is a pervasive sea of microwave radiation, a remnant from the superheated birth of the universe roughly 13.7 billion years ago.

Devin Crichton, a Johns Hopkins graduate student and the paper’s lead author, said the thermal energy levels were analyzed to see if they rise above predictions for what it would take to stop star formation. A large number of galaxies were studied to give the study statistical heft, he said.

“For feedback to turn off star formation, it must be occurring broadly,” said Crichton, one of five Johns Hopkins scientists who led the work conducted by a total of 23 investigators from 18 institutions.

To take the temperature measurements that would show the SZ Effect, the scientists used information gathered by two ground-based telescopes and one receiver mounted on a space observatory. Using several instruments with different strengths in search of the SZ Effect is relatively new, Marriage said.

“It’s a pretty wild sort of thermometer,” Marriage said.

Information gathered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey [SDSS] by an optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico was used to find the quasars.

SDSS Telescope at Apache Point, NM, USA

Thermal energy and evidence of the SZ Effect were found using information from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope [ACT], an instrument designed to study the CMB that stands in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

Princeton Atacama Cosmology Telescope

To focus on the dust, investigators used data from the SPIRE, or Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, mounted on the [ESA]Herschel Space Observatory.

ESA/Herschel SPIRE

ESA/Herschel

Nadia Zakamska, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Johns Hopkins and one of the report’s co-authors, said it is only in the last few years that evidence of this phenomenon from direct observation has been compiled. The SZ Effect, she said, is a novel approach to the subject, making more clear the full effect of galactic wind on the surrounding galaxy.

“Unlike all other methods that are probing small clumps within the wind, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect is sensitive to the bulk of the wind, the extremely hot plasma that’s filling the volume of the wind, and is completely undetectable using any other technique,” she said.

See the full article here .

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The Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, with the inauguration of its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. “What are we aiming at?” Gilman asked in his installation address. “The encouragement of research … and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.”

The mission laid out by Gilman remains the university’s mission today, summed up in a simple but powerful restatement of Gilman’s own words: “Knowledge for the world.”

What Gilman created was a research university, dedicated to advancing both students’ knowledge and the state of human knowledge through research and scholarship. Gilman believed that teaching and research are interdependent, that success in one depends on success in the other. A modern university, he believed, must do both well. The realization of Gilman’s philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and at other institutions that later attracted Johns Hopkins-trained scholars, revolutionized higher education in America, leading to the research university system as it exists today.

From New Scientist: “Ancient quasars in distant galaxies caught switching on suddenly”

New Scientist

20 January 2016
Shannon Hall

ESO/M. Kornmesser

Most cosmic events happen on huge timescales. Not so for quasars – the bright centres of galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes gobbling down gas and dust. We have just seen them ignite in a matter of years.

Astronomers expect quasars to use up their fuel and settle down into quiet galaxies – a process that should take hundreds of thousands of years. So last year, when a dozen quasars were spotted shutting down in just hundreds of days, it was a shock.

Chelsea MacLeod of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her colleagues wondered if these objects might turn on again. The team compared images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with images of the same objects from the Pan-STARRS survey, taken 10 years later.

SDSS telescope, Apache Point, NM, USA

Pan-STARRS telescope

After flagging 1000 objects that varied in brightness from one survey to the next, the team pinpointed five galaxies that appeared to shape-shift into quasars.

Fast work

What’s more, one quasar appeared to turn on several years after turning off. But it’s not clear if the other four are turning on for the first time, or if they are also flickering.

The real surprise is the timescale. Previously, astronomers thought it should take thousands to millions of years to funnel enough gas on to a supermassive black hole for it to spawn a quasar. It definitely shouldn’t take less than 10.

“This is a bit of an embarrassing moment for black hole and quasar scientists,” says Eric Morganson of Harvard University. “The conventional wisdom was found to be dramatically wrong.”

Now the big question is how these beasts ignite in the first place. The most common explanation has two galaxies colliding, sending gas and dust swirling into the merged supermassive black hole. But the SDSS galaxy images show no sign of recent collisions, so something else must be acting as a funnel for the gas.

Some kind of instability in the galaxy itself, such as a central bar or spiral arms that push stars out of their circular orbits, could provide the funnel, suggests Mike Eracleous of Pennsylvania State University. But according to models this happens on much longer timescales than decades.

Future studies will hopefully shed light on such a rapid process, which in turn affects how galaxies, like the Milky Way, form and evolve. “Understanding how [quasars] work is really part of the puzzle of how we went from the big bang to galaxies to stars to planets,” Morganson says.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1509.08393

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From ALMA: “Chaotic Turbulence Roiling ‘Most Luminous Galaxy’ in the Universe”

ALMA

15 January 2016
Tanio Díaz Santos
Núcleo de Astronomía, Facultad de Ingeniería
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
Tel: +56 2 2213 0480
Email: tanio.diaz@mail.udp.cl

Valeria Foncea

Education and Public Outreach Officer

Joint ALMA Observatory

Santiago, Chile

Tel: +56 2 467 6258

Cell: +56 9 75871963
Email: vfoncea@alma.cl

Charles E. Blue
Public Information Officer
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Tel: +1 434 296 0314
Cell: +1 434.242.9559
E-mail: cblue@nrao.edu

Richard Hook
Public Information Officer, ESO

Garching bei München, Germany

Tel: +49 89 3200 6655

Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

Masaaki Hiramatsu

Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
Tokyo, Japan

Tel: +81 422 34 3630

E-mail: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Artist impression of W2246-0526, a single galaxy glowing in infrared light as intensely as approximately 350 trillion suns. It is so violently turbulent that it may eventually jettison its entire supply of star-forming gas, according to new observations with ALMA. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; Dana Berry / SkyWorks; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).

The most luminous galaxy in the Universe –a so-called obscured quasar 12.4 billion light-years away – is so violently turbulent that it may eventually jettison its entire supply of star-forming gas, according to new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

A team of researchers used ALMA to trace, for the first time, the actual motion of the galaxy’s interstellar medium – the gas and dust between the stars. What they found, according to Tanio Díaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and lead author of this study, is a galaxy “so chaotic that it is ripping itself apart.”

Previous studies with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft reveal that the galaxy, dubbed W2246-0526, is glowing in infrared light as intensely as approximately 350 trillion suns.

NASA/WISE

Evidence strongly suggests that this galaxy is actually an obscured quasar, a very distant galaxy [whi h] contains a voraciously feeding supermassive black hole at its center that is completely obscured behind a thick blanket of dust.

This galaxy’s startling brightness is powered by a tiny, yet incredibly energetic disk of gas that is being superheated as it spirals in on the supermassive black hole. The light from this blazingly bright accretion disk is then absorbed by the surrounding dust, which re-emits the energy as infrared light.

“These properties make this object a beast in the infrared,” said Roberto Assef, an astronomer with the Universidad Diego Portales and leader of the ALMA observing team. “The powerful infrared energy emitted by the dust then has a direct and violent impact on the entire galaxy, producing extreme turbulence throughout the interstellar medium.”

The astronomers compare this turbulent action to a pot of boiling water. If these conditions continue, they say, the galaxy’s intense infrared radiation would boil away all of its interstellar gas.

This galaxy belongs to a very unusual type of quasar known as Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxies or Hot DOGs These objects are very rare; only 1 out of every 3,000 quasars observed by WISE belong to this class.

The research team used ALMA to precisely map the motion of ionized carbon atoms throughout the entire galaxy. These atoms, which are tracers for interstellar gas, naturally emit infrared light, which becomes shifted to millimeter wavelengths as it travels the vast cosmic distances to Earth due to the expansion of the Universe.

“Large amounts of ionized carbon were found in an extremely turbulent dynamic state throughout the galaxy,” Díaz-Santos describes. The data reveal that this interstellar material is careening anywhere from 500 to 600 kilometers per second across the entire galaxy.

The astronomers believe that this turbulence is primarily due to the fact that the region around the black hole is at least 100 times more luminous than the rest of the host galaxy combined; in other quasars, the proportion is much more modest. This intense yet localized radiation exerts tremendous pressure on the entire galaxy, to potentially devastating effect.

“We suspected that this galaxy was in a transformative stage of its life because of the enormous amount of infrared energy discovered with WISE,” said Peter Eisenhardt with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and scientific leader of the WISE mission. “Now ALMA has shown us that the raging furnace in this galaxy is making the pot boil over.”

Current models of galactic dynamics combined with the ALMA data indicate that this galaxy is unstable and its interstellar gas is being blown away in all directions. This means that the galaxy’s Hot DOG days are numbered as it matures into a more traditional unobscured quasar.

“If this pattern continues, it is possible that in the future W2246 ends up shedding a large part of the gas and dust it contains,” concludes Manuel Aravena also from the Universidad Diego Portales, and co-author of the study. “Only ALMA, with its unparalleled resolution, can allow us to see this object in high definition and fathom such an important episode in the life of this galaxy.”

This article, The Strikingly Uniform, Highly Turbulent Interstellar Medium of The Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe, will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

From ESO article:

This research was presented in a paper “The Strikingly Uniform, Highly Turbulent Interstellar Medium of The Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe”, by T. Díaz-Santos et al., and will be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team is composed of T. Díaz-Santos (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), R. J. Assef (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), A. W. Blain (University of Leicester, UK) , C.-W. Tsai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA) , M. Aravena (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile), P. Eisenhardt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA), J. Wu (University of California Los Angeles, California, USA), D. Stern (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA) and C. Bridge (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA).

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.