Are Quasars Growing in Secret?

An artist’s illustration of a distant lumin.ous quasar
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.

Figure 1: To observe the nebula (red outlined region in the rightmost panel), you have to subtract out the light coming from the quasar (leftmost panel). Adapted from Ďurovčíková et al. 2025

Figure 2: The age estimates derived by today’s authors (y-axis) are similar to the line-of-sight age estimates (x-axis), and generally follow a one-to-one relationship, suggesting that line-of-sight obscuration effects are not leading astronomers to underestimate the age of a quasar. Adapted from Ďurovčíková et al. 2025

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.

Source: American Astronomical Societ/AAS-Nova

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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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Editor’s Note: Astrobites is a graduate-student-run organization that digests astrophysical literature for undergraduate students. As part of the partnership between the AAS and astrobites, we occasionally repost astrobites content here at AAS Nova. We hope you enjoy this post from astrobites; the original can be viewed at astrobites.org.

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NASA's Swift Mission Maps a Star's 'Death Spiral' into a Black Hole

This artist’s rendering shows the tidal disruption event named ASASSN-14li, where a star wandering too close to a 3-million-solar-mass black hole was torn apart. The debris gathered into an accretion disk around the black hole. New data from NASA's Swift satellite show that the initial formation of the disk was shaped by interactions among incoming and outgoing streams of tidal debris. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Hi-res image

Some 290 million years ago, a star much like the sun wandered too close to the central black hole of its galaxy. Intense tides tore the star apart, which produced an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that first reached Earth in 2014. Now, a team of scientists using observations from NASA's Swift satellite have mapped out how and where these different wavelengths were produced in the event, named ASASSN-14li, as the shattered star's debris circled the black hole.

"We discovered brightness changes in X-rays that occurred about a month after similar changes were observed in visible and UV light," said Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the lead researcher of the study. "We think this means the optical and UV emission arose far from the black hole, where elliptical streams of orbiting matter crashed into each other."

This animation illustrates how debris from a tidally disrupted star collides with itself, creating shock waves that emit ultraviolet and optical light far from the black hole. According to Swift observations of ASASSN-14li, these clumps took about a month to fall back to the black hole, where they produced changes in the X-ray emission that correlated with the earlier UV and optical changes. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This video is public domain and can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio.

Astronomers think ASASSN-14li was produced when a sun-like star wandered too close to a 3-million-solar-mass black hole similar to the one at the center of our own galaxy. For comparison, the event horizon of a black hole like this is about 13 times bigger than the sun, and the accretion disk formed by the disrupted star could extend to more than twice Earth's distance from the sun.

When a star passes too close to a black hole with 10,000 or more times the sun's mass, tidal forces outstrip the star's own gravity, converting the star into a stream of debris. Astronomers call this a tidal disruption event. Matter falling toward a black hole collects into a spinning accretion disk, where it becomes compressed and heated before eventually spilling over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. Tidal disruption flares carry important information about how this debris initially settles into an accretion disk.

Astronomers know the X-ray emission in these flares arises very close to the black hole. But the location of optical and UV light was unclear, even puzzling. In some of the best-studied events, this emission seems to be located much farther than where the black hole's tides could shatter the star. Additionally, the gas emitting the light seemed to remain at steady temperatures for much longer than expected.

ASASSN-14li was discovered Nov. 22, 2014, in images obtained by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN), which includes robotic telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Follow-up observations with Swift's X-ray and Ultraviolet/Optical telescopes began eight days later and continued every few days for the next nine months. The researchers supplemented later Swift observations with optical data from the Las Cumbres Observatory headquartered in Goleta, California.   

In a paper describing the results published March 15 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Pasham, Cenko and their colleagues show how interactions among the infalling debris could create the observed optical and UV emission.

Tidal debris initially falls toward the black hole but overshoots, arcing back out along elliptical orbits and eventually colliding with the incoming stream.

"Returning clumps of debris strike the incoming stream, which results in shock waves that emit visible and ultraviolet light," said Goddard's Bradley Cenko, the acting Swift principal investigator and a member of the science team. "As these clumps fall down to the black hole, they also modulate the X-ray emission there."

Future observations of other tidal disruption events will be needed to further clarify the origin of optical and ultraviolet light.

Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University in University Park, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory and the Italian Space Agency in Italy, with additional collaborators in Germany and Japan.

Related:

• Scientists Identify a Black Hole Choking on Stardust (MIT)

• ASASSN-14li: Destroyed Star Rains onto Black Hole, Winds Blow it Back

• 'Cry' of a Shredded Star Heralds a New Era for Testing Relativity

• Researchers Detail How a Distant Black Hole Devoured a Star

By Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Editor: Karl Hille

Source: NASA/Solar System and Beyond

An Over-Massive Black Hole in the Young Universe

An artist's impression of the Chandra X-ray Telescope in Earth orbit. Astronomers have used Chandra to identify an X-ray bright supermassive black hole from an era only two billion years after the big bang. The finding appears to challenge conventional wisdom about how quickly such supermassive black holes can form in galaxies. Credit: NASA/Chandra

Astronomers generally accept the notion that black holes at the centers of galaxies co-evolve with their host galaxies, and that they have done did so during all cosmic epochs, from the early period after the big band until today. This means that as a galaxy grows in mass, which it does by accreting material (and perhaps also consuming other galaxies) from the intergalactic medium, its black hole also accretes matter and grows. Indeed, the black hole is so massive -- perhaps as much as ten percent (!) of the entire stellar mass of the galaxy – that these two growth processes may be related, for example, because the black hole influences accretion onto the galaxy. The black hole accretion process may have other consequences too, like suppressing star formation by heating and/or disrupting nearby molecular clouds.

Testing these ideas is difficult because it requires measuring black hole properties in cosmic epochs when the universe was only a few billion years old and at the correspondingly cosmic distances even ultraluminous galaxies appear faint to us. A few recent studies have indicated that some supermassive black holes actually grew faster than their galaxies in epochs about three billion years after the big bang, but these measurements were made only on exceptionally X-ray luminous objects which are perhaps not representative of most systems and whose galaxy masses are very uncertain. 

CfA astronomers Francesca Civano, Martin Elvis, and Hyewon Suh joined their colleagues in using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and another X-ray mission, XMM-Newton, to select an X-ray bright black-hole nucleus only two billion years after the big bang, and then to observe it in the infrared with the Keck telescope to study its ionized hydrogen gas, a tracer of black hole growth. The astronomers find that the black hole in this galaxy has apparently grown much more efficiently than the galaxy itself, contrary to conventional models. In fact, it is as much fifty times more massive compared to its galaxy than all but the most extreme local examples – it is a whopping seven billion solar masses. The important implication is that it grew to this size in a very much shorter time than local galaxies, which had thirteen billion years to grow. The galaxy also appears to be making stars without any suppression. The new paper both challenges the conventional theoretical paradigm and steers future research toward examining these distant X-ray monsters.

Reference(s): 

 "An Over-Massive Black Hole in a Typical Star-Forming Galaxy, 2 Billion Years After the Big Bang," Benny Trakhtenbrot, C. Megan Urry, Francesca Civano, David J. Rosario, Martin Elvis, Kevin Schawinski, Hyewon Suh, Angela Bongiorno, Brooke D. Simmons, Science, 2015 (in press).

 

 Source: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)