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A remote galaxy shining with the light of more than 300 trillion suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The galaxy is the most luminous galaxy found to date and belongs to a new class of objects recently discovered by WISE -- extremely luminous infrared galaxies, or ELIRGs.
"We are looking at a very intense phase of galaxy evolution," said Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, lead author of a new report appearing in the May 22 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "This dazzling light may be from the main growth spurt of the galaxy's black hole."
The brilliant galaxy, known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a behemoth black hole at its belly, gorging itself on gas. Supermassive black holes draw gas and matter into a disk around them, heating the disk to roaring temperatures of millions of degrees and blasting out high-energy, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light. The light is blocked by surrounding cocoons of dust. As the dust heats up, it radiates infrared light.
Immense black holes are common at the cores of galaxies, but finding one this big so "far back" in the cosmos is rare. Because light from the galaxy hosting the black hole has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us, astronomers are seeing the object as it was in the distant past. The black hole was already billions of times the mass of our sun when our universe was only a tenth of its present age of 13.8 billion years.
The new study outlines three reasons why the black holes in the ELIRGs could have grown so massive. First, they may have been born big. In other words, the "seeds," or embryonic black holes, might be bigger than thought possible.
"How do you get an elephant?" asked Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for WISE at JPL and a co-author on the paper. "One way is start with a baby elephant."
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-wise-spacecraft-discovers-most-luminous-galaxy-in-universe
[Paper]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.1751
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 25 2015, @11:32AM
I'll bite.
If we keep refining our ability to see redshifted
objectslight, will we eventually be looking at a cloud of hydrogen from before galaxies formed?[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by boristhespider on Monday May 25 2015, @12:53PM
There's not much to see in a universe filled almost entirely with neutral hydrogen and neutral helium. After the formation of the CMB, that's basically all there was - the CMB itself is effectively a (heavily redshifted) photograph of the universe as it was when it cooled enough for neutral hydrogen to form. There weren't any light sources after that, so for a long period after the formation of the CMB and before the formation of the first stars there's literally nothing we could see. Observational cosmology will never be able to see earlier than the CMB (redshift of 1100 or so), nor in the interim between the formation of the CMB and the first stars (redshift of between about 5 and 10). That epoch is known as "reionisation", by the way, since the first stars, which were most likely violent behemoths, emitted more than enough high-energy radiation to strip the electrons back out of the hydrogen and helium atoms.
Note that what I've said is not quite true, either. We will never directly see in the interim period. However, we could in principle see some secondary effects on the CMB, due to gravitational interactions with the structures that are forming - both lensing and also what's known as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, an additional redshifting of the CMB caused by photons falling into gravitational wells that are shallower going in than they are coming out. But I'd not want to be the one to try and tease those from the data. After reionisation the CMB can interact directly with the reionised gases, and various smaller scale physical processes also emit in the microwave and muddy it up further - both these are likely to drown out most pre-reionisation effects unless there's something really interesting going on, while the ISW is vastly dominated by the far-deeper gravitational wells in the modern universe and, distressingly, the acceleration of the universe which has a massive impact.