The Supermassive Black Hole That Failed

in StemSocial4 years ago

The galaxy cluster SpARCS1049 has a pretty lazy supermassive black hole. It lost its food source so it just lays around sitting around.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Gigantic black holes that can usually be found in the centers of galaxies tend to be active. But astronomers recently found a supermassive black hole that isn’t participating in the life in the galaxy cluster. It’s just lazy. These lazy black holes could potentially explain the extreme amount of stars created in some farther away galaxy clusters.

Galaxy clusters include hundreds or even thousands of galaxies made from hot gas. The mass of this gas tends to be larger than the total mass of all the galaxies in the galaxy cluster. The role of supermassive black holes tends to be that they expel matter in the form of galactic wind. By this, they usually prevent the cooling down of the gas and thus also preventing the creation of new stars. This process makes the supermassive black hole essentially “control” the activity and evolution of its galaxy cluster.

But what if the supermassive black hole sort of fails and is not active? That seems to have happened in the galaxy cluster SpARCS104922.6+564032.5 (or SpARCS1049) which is roughly 9.9 billion light-years away from us. It was observed by a team of astronomers led by Julie Hlavacek-Lorrondo from the University of Montreal.

Researchers previously observed the SPARCS1049 galaxy cluster using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. When they did so, they noticed that new stars are being created in the cluster and insane numbers. Stars equal to a mass of 900 Suns are being created there every single year. We are definitely not used to that.

But even more, interestingly, these stars are being born extremely fast in an area that is about 80 thousand light-years from the center of the SpARCS1049 cluster. This is outside of all the galaxies in the cluster. The researchers think it can be explained by the cooling down of the gas that permeates the whole cluster. This gas has a temperature of 65 million degrees in the majority of the cluster. But, where the stars are being born rapidly, it seems to have a temperature of just 10 million degrees. And it all seems to be caused by the lazy supermassive black hole that just doesn’t give any energy to its surroundings. And when that happens it seems that new star creation can get out of hand.

But what is the supermassive black hole of the cluster SpARCS1049 so lazy? It could be because this monster is starving. It is outside the largest concentration of gas in the cluster. The lack of fuel dampens all the activity of this black hole making the surrounding gas colder. And the gas gets colder quicker at the places where it is most dense. The starving could be caused by an ancient collision of galaxies that happened as the cluster evolved. This collision may have swept away the area of the densest gas away from the center.

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