Credit: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)
Title: Quasar Lifetime Measurements from Extended Lyα Nebulae at z∼6
Authors: Dominika Ďurovčíková et al.
First Author’s Institution: MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Status: Published in ApJ
Observations have shown that galaxies, from our own Milky Way to far out into the distant universe, often host supermassive black holes
at their centres. While the exact growth history of supermassive black
holes is still uncertain, astronomers think that they likely begin as
much less massive black holes, which grow primarily by eating up gas in a
process known as accretion.
As gas falls into the black hole, it releases a huge amount of energy,
allowing astronomers to observe accreting black holes even when they’re
billions of light-years away from us. The most luminous accreting
supermassive black holes are known as quasars.
A supermassive black hole pulls gas in towards itself due to the force of gravity, but light emitted by the gas simultaneously exerts an outward pressure known as radiation pressure. The faster gas is being pulled into the black hole, the more light is emitted by the gas, and the stronger the pressure becomes. Eventually, the pressure will win out over gravity, preventing the black hole from accreting more gas. The theoretical maximum rate at which a black hole could accrete gas, without the gas being blown out by radiation pressure, is known as the Eddington rate.
If you took a black hole that initially weighed about 100 times the mass of our Sun and consistently fed it at the Eddington rate, it would take about 1 billion years to grow to the size of a supermassive black hole. However, measurements of quasar lifetimes suggest that black holes don’t continuously accrete at the Eddington rate, and instead, black holes go through phases of accretion. As a result, we should not expect to find supermassive black holes within the first billion years of the universe’s history.
But the universe loves to throw astronomers curveballs. Indeed, we have observed quasars less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, suggesting that this simple picture of supermassive black hole growth is not quite right. Many mechanisms have been proposed as ways to speed up black hole growth, including accretion rates higher than the Eddington rate, mergers between two black holes, and phases of obscured growth during which the black hole accretes at the Eddington rate, but most of the light released in this process is hidden from view.
Today’s authors tackle the question of whether black holes have substantial phases of obscured growth by measuring the lifetimes of early universe quasars. Previous measurements have suggested that these quasars have only been active for less than 1 million years. However, the method that was previously used could be underestimating quasar lifetimes if there was a period of obscured growth. To determine whether this is the case, today’s authors use a different, independent method of measuring the quasar’s lifetime; if there’s a significant mismatch between the two age estimates, then it’s likely that the quasar has had significant periods of obscured growth.
The key to the methods used by today’s authors is that they probe different lines of sight to the quasar. Previous methods quantified the effect of a quasar’s light on the intergalactic medium (the diffuse gas in between galaxies) along the line of sight from the quasar to us. The method used in today’s article measures the size of a nebula of ionised gas, in the plane of the sky, at a right angle to the line of sight. While light from the quasar may have been obscured along our line of sight, it’s unlikely to have also been obscured at a different angle at the exact same time.
A quasar emits a lot of photons capable of ionising hydrogen, and as a result, a quasar can carve out bubbles of ionised gas in the otherwise neutral circumgalactic medium. The size of the ionised gas bubble, or nebula, grows at the speed of light, so if you know the size of the nebula, you can estimate the time since quasar activity began. Today’s authors looked for ionised gas in the circumgalactic medium of six early universe quasars, all of which are estimated to have very short lifetimes based on line-of-sight measurements.
To observe ionised nebulae in the circumgalactic medium, today’s authors use observations from the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE). The first three panels of Figure 1 show you (left to right) the quasar; the point-spread function (PSF), or a model of how the quasar’s light diffracts as it’s observed by MUSE; and the image of the region surrounding the quasar once you subtract the PSF from the image. Each pixel is colour-coded by brightness. The last two panels also show the PSF-subtracted image, but are instead colour-coded by the ratio of signal to noise in each pixel. In the last panel, the signal has been smoothed out, and you can see the structure of a nebula (outlined in red) emerge from the image.
A supermassive black hole pulls gas in towards itself due to the force of gravity, but light emitted by the gas simultaneously exerts an outward pressure known as radiation pressure. The faster gas is being pulled into the black hole, the more light is emitted by the gas, and the stronger the pressure becomes. Eventually, the pressure will win out over gravity, preventing the black hole from accreting more gas. The theoretical maximum rate at which a black hole could accrete gas, without the gas being blown out by radiation pressure, is known as the Eddington rate.
If you took a black hole that initially weighed about 100 times the mass of our Sun and consistently fed it at the Eddington rate, it would take about 1 billion years to grow to the size of a supermassive black hole. However, measurements of quasar lifetimes suggest that black holes don’t continuously accrete at the Eddington rate, and instead, black holes go through phases of accretion. As a result, we should not expect to find supermassive black holes within the first billion years of the universe’s history.
But the universe loves to throw astronomers curveballs. Indeed, we have observed quasars less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, suggesting that this simple picture of supermassive black hole growth is not quite right. Many mechanisms have been proposed as ways to speed up black hole growth, including accretion rates higher than the Eddington rate, mergers between two black holes, and phases of obscured growth during which the black hole accretes at the Eddington rate, but most of the light released in this process is hidden from view.
Today’s authors tackle the question of whether black holes have substantial phases of obscured growth by measuring the lifetimes of early universe quasars. Previous measurements have suggested that these quasars have only been active for less than 1 million years. However, the method that was previously used could be underestimating quasar lifetimes if there was a period of obscured growth. To determine whether this is the case, today’s authors use a different, independent method of measuring the quasar’s lifetime; if there’s a significant mismatch between the two age estimates, then it’s likely that the quasar has had significant periods of obscured growth.
The key to the methods used by today’s authors is that they probe different lines of sight to the quasar. Previous methods quantified the effect of a quasar’s light on the intergalactic medium (the diffuse gas in between galaxies) along the line of sight from the quasar to us. The method used in today’s article measures the size of a nebula of ionised gas, in the plane of the sky, at a right angle to the line of sight. While light from the quasar may have been obscured along our line of sight, it’s unlikely to have also been obscured at a different angle at the exact same time.
A quasar emits a lot of photons capable of ionising hydrogen, and as a result, a quasar can carve out bubbles of ionised gas in the otherwise neutral circumgalactic medium. The size of the ionised gas bubble, or nebula, grows at the speed of light, so if you know the size of the nebula, you can estimate the time since quasar activity began. Today’s authors looked for ionised gas in the circumgalactic medium of six early universe quasars, all of which are estimated to have very short lifetimes based on line-of-sight measurements.
To observe ionised nebulae in the circumgalactic medium, today’s authors use observations from the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE). The first three panels of Figure 1 show you (left to right) the quasar; the point-spread function (PSF), or a model of how the quasar’s light diffracts as it’s observed by MUSE; and the image of the region surrounding the quasar once you subtract the PSF from the image. Each pixel is colour-coded by brightness. The last two panels also show the PSF-subtracted image, but are instead colour-coded by the ratio of signal to noise in each pixel. In the last panel, the signal has been smoothed out, and you can see the structure of a nebula (outlined in red) emerge from the image.
Only three of the six quasars have a detected nebula. In the case of the non-detections, the authors argue that this is likely because the nebulae are just too small to be resolved by the telescope, rather than the nebulae being too faint. In fact, the nebulae could have been ten times fainter than the ones observed, and they still would have been detected. As a result, the authors can only estimate the ages of three of the quasars and place upper limits on the ages of the other three.
Figure 2 shows the agreement between the ages implied by nebula sizes (y-axis) and the pre-existing line-of-sight age estimates (x-axis). The grey shaded region indicates that ages below about 7,600 years could not have been detected. The black dotted line shows the one-to-one agreement between the two age estimates, and individual measurements are shown by the red squares with error bars.
Age estimates from the two methods are broadly pretty consistent, suggesting that obscuration effects are not causing one method to be severely underestimating the lifetime of a quasar. Therefore, for these six quasars, it seems unlikely that their growth can be primarily explained by phases of obscured growth. Instead, some other mechanism must have allowed these black holes to grow rapidly during the early universe and reach their supermassive sizes.
The mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow so quickly is still to be solved, but today’s article shows us that we haven’t been missing phases of obscured growth. The results of today’s article provide an independent measurement of quasar lifetimes, which models of supermassive black hole growth should be able to explain.
Original astrobite edited by Cesily King.
About the author, Nathalie Korhonen Cuestas:
Nathalie Korhonen Cuestas is a second-year PhD student at Northwestern University, where her research focuses on the chemical evolution of galaxies.
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