"Black-Hole Bonanza" --New NASA Image Reveals Highest Concentration of Supermassive Objects Ever Seen
NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory has completed the deepest X-ray image ever obtained,
made with over 7 million seconds of observing time revealing the best picture
ever at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after
the Big Bang. The central region of the image contains the highest
concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000
objects that would fit into the area of the full Moon and about a billion over
the entire sky.
The image
shown below is from the Chandra Deep Field-South, or CDF-S. The full CDF-S
field covers an approximately circular region on the sky with an area about
two-thirds that of the full Moon. However, the outer regions of the image,
where the sensitivity to X-ray emission is lower, are not shown here. The
colors in this image represent different levels of X-ray energy detected by
Chandra. Here the lowest-energy X-rays are red, the medium band is green, and
the highest-energy X-rays observed by Chandra are blue.
Researchers
used the CDF-S data in combination with data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), both including data from NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope to study galaxies and black holes between one and two
billion years after the Big Bang.
In one part
of the study, the team looked at the X-ray emission from galaxies detected in
the Hubble images, at distances between 11.9 and 12.9 billion light years from
Earth. About 50 of these distant galaxies were individually detected with
Chandra. The team then used a technique called X-ray stacking to investigate
X-ray emission from the 2,076 distant galaxies that were not individually
detected. They added up all the X-ray counts near the positions of these
galaxies, enabling much greater sensitivity to be obtained. Through stacking
the team were able to achieve equivalent exposure times up to about 8 billion
seconds, equivalent to about 260 years.
The NASA
team found evidence that black holes in the early Universe grow mostly in
bursts, rather than via the slow accumulation of matter. The team may have also
found hints about the types of seeds that form supermassive black holes. If
supermassive black holes are born as "light" seeds weighing about 100
times the Sun's mass, the growth rate required to reach a mass of about a
billion times the Sun in the early Universe may be so high that it challenges
current models for such growth. If supermassive black holes are born with more
mass, the required growth rate is not as high. The data in the CDF-S suggest
that the seeds for supermassive black holes may be "heavy" with
masses about 10,000 to 100,000 times that of the Sun.
Such deep
X-ray data like those in the CDF-S provide useful insights for understanding
the physical properties of the first supermassive black holes. The relative
number of luminous and faint objects -- in what astronomers call the shape of
the "luminosity function" -- depends on the mixture of the several
physical quantities involved in black hole growth, including the mass of the
black hole seeds and the rate at which they are pulling in material. The CDF-S
data show a rather "flat" luminosity function (i.e., a relative large
number of bright objects) that can be used to infer possible combinations of
these physical quantities. However, definitive results can only come from
further observations.
The paper on
black hole growth in the early Universe was led by Fabio Vito of Pennsylvania
State University in University Park, Penn and was published in an August 10th,
2016 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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