New research indicates that quasars are born when galaxies crash.
Credit: Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein/Yale University
When galaxies collide, bright things happen in the universe.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared vision, astronomers have
unveiled some of the previously hidden origins of quasars, the brightest
objects in the universe. A new study finds that quasars are born when
galaxies crash into each other and fuel supermassive, central black
holes.
"The Hubble images confirm that the most luminous quasars in the
universe result from violent mergers between galaxies, which fuels black
hole growth and transforms the host galaxies," said C. Megan Urry, the
Israel Munson Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Yale
University, and co-author of the study published online June 18 in The Astrophysical Journal.
"These mergers are also the sites of future black hole mergers, which
we hope will one day be visible with gravitational wave telescopes,"
Urry said.
Quasars emit a light as bright as that of one trillion stars. Over
the past two decades, researchers have concluded that the energy for
quasars comes from supermassive black holes inside the cores of distant
galaxies.
But where do the supermassive black holes get their fuel? It had been
theorized previously that such energy could come from the merger of two
galaxies. The new study confirms it by using Hubble's sensitivity at
near-infrared wavelengths of light to see past the intense glow of the
quasar, to the host galaxies themselves.
"The Hubble observations are telling us that the peak of quasar
activity in the early universe is driven by galaxies colliding and then
merging together," said Eilat Glikman of Middlebury College in Vermont,
lead author of the study and a former Yale postdoctoral researcher. "We
are seeing the quasars in their teenage years, when they are growing
quickly and all messed up."
Glikman decided to look for "dust reddened quasars" in several
ground-based infrared and radio sky surveys. These quasars are enveloped
in dust, dimming their visible light.
Using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, Glikman looked at 11 such quasars
from the peak of the universe's star-formation era, 12 billion years
ago. "The new images capture the dust-clearing transitional phase of the
merger-driven black hole scenario," Glikman said. "The Hubble images
are both beautiful and descriptive."
Other authors of the study were Brooke Simmons of Oxford University, a
former graduate student at Yale; Madeline Mailly of Middlebury College;
Kevin Schawinski of ETH Zurich, a former Einstein Fellow at Yale; and
M. Lacy of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville,
Va.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from
materials provided by
Yale University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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