Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Scuola Normale Superiore/Pacucci, F. et al, Optical: NASA/STScI;
Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss.
Using data from NASA's three Great Observatories, scientists have found the best evidence to date of a mechanism that produced supermassive black holes in the early Universe. If confirmed, this result, described in our latest press release, could lead to new insight into how black holes were formed and grew billions of years ago.
This artist's illustration
depicts a possible "seed" for the formation of a supermassive black
hole, that is an object that contains millions or even billions of times
the mass of the Sun. In the artist's illustration, the gas cloud is
shown as the wispy blue material, while the orange and red disk is
showing material being funneled toward the growing black hole through
its gravitational pull.
Researchers found evidence that two objects could have formed in this
way, by directly collapsing into a black hole from a large cloud of
gas. These two candidates for being "direct collapse black holes" are so
distant that they may have formed less than one billion years after the
Big Bang.
The inset boxes show data from the Hubble Space Telescope (right) and Chandra X-ray Observatory
(left) of one of the objects described above. The Hubble image shows
the faint, distant galaxy at the center of the image and the Chandra
image shows X-ray emission from material falling onto the black hole in the same galaxy.
The researchers used computer models of black hole seeds combined
with a new method to select candidates for these objects from
long-exposure images from Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer (not shown in
this graphic). By analyzing the combined light
from the three telescopes, the team was able to search through
thousands of objects to look for any that had properties that matched
those predicted by their models.
Two candidates emerged that had the expected red color, seen by
Hubble and Spitzer, as well as the X-ray profile predicted from Chandra.
These objects were found in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep
Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Great Observatories Origins Deep
Survey-South surveys. The next steps will involve getting more data on
these two intriguing objects as well as extending the analysis to other
surveys to look for more direct collapse black hole candidates.
These results will appear in the June 21st issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.
The authors of the paper are Fabio Pacucci (SNS, Italy), Andrea Ferrara
(SNS), Andrea Grazian (INAF), Fabrizio Fiore (INAF), Emaneule Giallongo
(INAF), and Simonetta Puccetti (ASI Science Data Center). NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra
program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Fast Facts for GOODS-S 29323:
Scale: Image is about 15 arcsec across. (about 212,000 light years)
Category: Black Holes, Cosmology/Deep Fields/X-ray Background
Observation Date: 54 pointings between Oct 15, 1999 to Jul 22, 2010
Observation Time: 1111 hours 6 min (46 days 7 hours 6 min).
Obs. ID: 441, 581-582, 1431, 1672, 2239, 2312-2313, 2405-2406, 2409, 8591-8597, 9575, 9578, 9593, 9596, 9718, 12043-12055, 12123, 12128-12129, 12135, 12137-12138, 12213, 12218-12220, 12222-12223, 12227, 12230-12234
Instrument: ACISReferences: Pacucci, F. et al, 2016, MNRAS, 459, 1432; arXiv:1603.08522
Color Code: X-ray (Blue), Optical (Gold)
Distance Estimate: About 13.2 billion light years (z=9.73)
