SDSS J1531+3414: Black Hole Fashions Stellar Beads on a String

SDSS J1531+3414

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/O. Omoruyi et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/G. Tremblay et al.; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

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A Tour of MSH 15-52 - More Videos

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Astronomers have discovered one of the most powerful eruptions from a black hole ever recorded in the system known as SDSS J1531+3414 (SDSS J1531 for short). As explained in our press release, this mega-explosion billions of years ago may help explain the formation of a striking pattern of star clusters around two massive galaxies, resembling “beads on a string.”

SDSS J1531 is a massive galaxy cluster containing hundreds of individual galaxies and huge reservoirs of hot gas and dark matter. At the center of SDSS J1531, which is located about 3.8 billion light-years away, two of the cluster’s largest galaxies are colliding with each other.

Astronomers used several telescopes to study SDSS J1531 including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a radio telescope. This composite image shows SDSS J1531 in X-rays from Chandra (blue and purple) that have been combined with radio data from LOFAR (dark pink) as well as an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope (appearing as yellow and white). The inset gives a close-in view of the center of SDSS J1531 in optical light, showing the two large galaxies and a set of 19 large clusters of stars, called superclusters, stretching across the middle. The image shows these star clusters are arranged in an ‘S’ formation that resembles beads on a string.

The multiwavelength data provides signs of an ancient, titanic eruption in SDSS J1531, which a team of researchers think was responsible for creation of the 19 star clusters. Their argument is that an extremely powerful jet from the supermassive black holes in the center of one of the large galaxies pushed the surrounding hot gas away from the black hole, creating a gigantic cavity. The evidence for a cavity comes from “wings” of bright X-ray emission, seen with Chandra, tracing dense gas near the center of SDSS J1531. These wings are the edge of the cavity and the less dense gas in between is part of the cavity. LOFAR shows radio waves from the remains of the jet’s energetic particles filling in the giant cavity. These features are highlighted in a labeled version of the image.

Multiwavelength Image of SDSS J1531, Labeled; Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/O. Omoruyi et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/G. Tremblay et al.; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

The astronomers also discovered cold and warm gas located near the opening of the cavity, detected with the Atacama Large Millimeter and submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Gemini North Telescope, respectively. A separate graphic shows the optical image with the cold gas added in green (left), and the warm gas added in red (right). The team argues that some of the hot gas pushed away from the black hole eventually cooled to form the cold and warm gas shown. The team thinks tidal effects from the two merging galaxies compressed the gas along curved paths, leading to the star clusters forming in the “beads on a string” pattern.

Cold and warm gas located near the opening of the cavity
Credit: Optical/Halpha: NASA/ESA/STScI; Radio: ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

A paper led by Osase Omoruyi of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) describing these results has recently been published in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online here. The authors of the paper are Grant Tremblay (CfA), Francoise Combes (Paris Observatory, France), Timothy Davis (Cardiff University, UK), Michael Gladders (University of Chicago), Alexey Vikhlinin (CfA), Paul Nulsen (CfA), Preeti Kharb (National Centre for Radio Astrophysics — Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India ), Stefi Baum (University of Manitoba, Canada), Christopher O’Dea (University of Manitoba, Canada), Keren Sharon (University of Michigan), Bryan Terrazas (Columbia University), Rebecca Nevin (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), Aimee Schechter (University of Colorado Boulder), John ZuHone (CfA), Michael McDonald (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Hakon Dahle (University of Oslo, Norway), Matthew B. Bayliss (University of Cincinnati), Thomas Connor (CfA), Michael Florian (University of Arizona), Jane Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and Sravani Vaddi (Arecibo Observatory)

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Tour: Stellar Beads on a String

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Visual Description:

This is an image of a cluster of galaxies called SDSS J1531+3414 in X-ray, optical, and radio light. The overall scene resembles a colorful display of lights as if viewed through a wet, glass window.

Blurry orange dots of different sizes are scattered across a black background. These orange dots are entire galaxies. Near the center of the image, two central galaxies appear as bright, white dots. Star clusters, resembling beads on a string in shades of electric blue, sweep over the galaxy on the left, through the space in between the galaxy pair, and then lightly coil beneath both galaxies. Clouds of blue, X-ray light, and dark pink, radio light, surround the two galaxies.

The blue cloud spreads out for thousands of light-years toward the region above the central galaxies. The dark pink cloud, somewhat resembling the shape of an upside down spinning top toy, stretches far below the two galaxies and slightly toward our left. This dark pink cloud represents the remains of a powerful jet, produced by a supermassive black hole within one of the two central galaxies. In the upper right corner of the image, another dark pink cloud is present. This cloud may be the relic of a counter-jet from the same black hole outburst.

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Fast Facts for (SDSS J1531+3414):

Scale: Image is about 1.5 arcmin (1.4 million light-years) across.
Category: Groups & Clusters of Galaxies, Black Holes
Coordinates (J2000): RA 15h 31m 10.66s | Dec +34° 14´ 25.71"
Constellation: Corona Borealis
Observation Dates: 2 observations Oct 20 and 28, 2015
Observation Time: 34 hours (1 day 10 hours)
Obs. ID: 17218, 18689
Instrument: ACIS
References: Omoruyi, O. et al., 2024, ApJ, Accepted; arXiv:2312.06762
Color Code: X-ray: blue, purple; Optical: red, green, blue; Radio: dark pink
Distance Estimate: About 3.8 billion light-years (z=0.335)

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Discovery of the Largest-class Monster Supercluster of Galaxies in the Universe 5.5 Billion Light-Years Away

Figure 1: This color composite image of a supercluster was captured by the Subaru Telescope's prime focus camera. The white contours in the center show the density distribution of galaxies, and the red regions indicate intense concentrations of dark matter. The numbered squares depict the locations of galaxy clusters associated with the supercluster. The surrounding panels are magnified views of these 19 clusters, showing the clusters of red galaxies that are common in galaxy clusters. The moon in the upper left depicts the apparent size of the full moon to provide a sense of scale. (Credit: NAOJ)

A team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Hiroshima University has discovered a massive supercluster of galaxies about 5.5 billion light-years away, based on the Big Data from the Subaru Telescope. Not only is there a strong concentration of galaxies and dark matter across an area of the sky roughly the size of 15 full moons, but there are at least 19 galaxy clusters associated with it, making it the largest supercluster ever identified in the Universe beyond 5 billion light years away.

Galaxies are comprised of gas and countless stars; and galaxy clusters, which are amalgamations of such galaxies, are known as the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the Universe. However, there is a still larger structure in the Universe called a supercluster, which develops after galaxy clusters further assemble. While superclusters extend over an area of about 100 megaparsecs (about 500 times the size of the Milky Way), the definition of a supercluster itself is still ambiguous; its true nature and what is going on inside it are still shrouded in mystery. In fact, the Milky Way is also inside the Laniakea supercluster, consisting of multiple galaxy clusters and superclusters (Note 1).

Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope has made a deep, wide-field survey, equivalent to 4,400 times the apparent size of the full moon, reaching over 10 billion light-years. The high-quality imaging data obtained from this program is currently the best resource for searching for unknown galaxy superclusters.

The research team examined the total stellar mass and dark matter distribution in the largest density excesses among the nearly 100 supercluster candidates (Note 2), which were discovered by the same team in the past (Note 3). As a result, the team detected a supercluster structure consisting of at least 19 clusters of galaxies centered on three dark matter-dense regions (Figure 1).

Comparison with cosmological simulations suggests that this supercluster has a dark matter mass about 10 times the mass of the Virgo supercluster in the local Universe. On top of that, two giant structures equivalent to superclusters have been identified immediately outside of the cluster, which means that the discovered supercluster may be a precursor to supermassive structures such as the Laniakea supercluster, the largest in the nearby Universe.

The lead author, Dr. Rhythm Shimakawa, Project Assistant Professor at NAOJ, says, "Indeed, the probability of finding such a supercluster about 5.5 billion light-years away, was 50-50 based on the data from the Subaru Telescope's strategic program. We plan to further investigate the three-dimensional structure and the morphology of the galaxies by using such instruments as Subaru Telescope’s PFS (wide field spectrograph) and the Euclid space telescope in the near future."

These results appeared as Shimakawa et al. "King Ghidorah Supercluster: Mapping the light and dark matter in a new supercluster at z = 0.55 using the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam" in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters on November 26, 2022.

Notes:

(Note 1) It is known that our Milky Way is located inside the Virgo supercluster, the core of which is composed of the Virgo cluster. The definition of a supercluster itself is still ambiguous, and thus in some cases, the term "supercluster" is also used to refer to a giant structure that envelops smaller superclusters.

(Note2) The distribution of dark matter was obtained using the weak gravitational lensing effect. The gravitational lensing effect is a phenomenon in which light emitted from distant galaxies appears distorted or brightened due to the bending of the light path when it passes through a strong gravitational field such as a galaxy cluster in the foreground. Weak gravitational lensing refers to relatively weak cases of this phenomenon. The supercluster in this study is the largest structure over 5 billion light-years away ever identified by weak gravitational lensing analysis.

(Note 3) "Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam excavates colossal over- and underdense structures over 360 deg2 out to z = 1", Shimakawa et al, 2021, MNRAS

Source: Subaru Telescope

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The Whole Picture of Distant Supercluster in Three Dimensions

Figure 1: The 3-D and 2-D maps of the number density of galaxies associated with the supercluster. In the 2-D map, the large-scale structures of galaxies located in the slice at about 7.3 billion years ago are shown. The white areas show the structures already known from previous studies, and the yellow areas show the structures newly discovered by this study. The structures marked by the dotted ellipses are to be confirmed by future works. The white vertical line in the figure corresponds to a distance of about 30 million light-years (i.e., 10 Mpc). (Credit: NAOJ)

Using the Subaru Telescope and Gemini-North Telescope, a team of astronomers has revealed that the supercluster CL1604, a distant supercluster located about 7.3 billion light-years away, is a large-scale 3-D structure extending over about 160 million light-years in the north-south direction. This is more than two times more extended than what was already known. Until now, we saw merely the “tip of the iceberg” of the supercluster. The wide-field capability of the Subaru Telescope enabled us to survey the whole of the supercluster and the Gemini-North Telescope played a critical role in confirming the structures. This is the outcome of the good synergy of the telescopes of the Maunakea observatories.

Galaxies are distributed inhomogeneously in the Universe. It is well-known that nearby galaxies are strongly influenced by their environment, e.g., whether they are located in dense areas called galaxy clusters or less dense areas called voids. However, how galaxies form and evolve along with the growth of the cosmic web structures is one of the hot topics of astronomy. A wide-field survey of the distant Universe allows us to witness what actually happened with galaxies in the early phase of structure formation in the Universe. Among the few superclusters currently known, one of the best targets for study is the supercluster CL1604. Based on previous studies, its extent is 80 million light-years and its era is 7.3 billion years ago.

The uniqueness of the data taken by Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope is the deep imaging data over a field wide enough to fully cover the known supercluster and the surrounding area. A team led by Masao Hayashi and Yusei Koyama from NAOJ estimated the distances of individual galaxies from the galaxy colors using a technique called “photometric redshift.” Then, the three dimensional picture of the large-scale structures appears, which consists of several galaxy clusters newly discovered in the north-south direction as well as the structures already known (Figure 1). 

Figure 2: The distribution of redshift (i.e., distance in the depth direction) of the galaxies confirmed by our spectroscopic observations. In each area, the histogram is color-coded by the distance of the galaxies. The same color for the histograms means that the galaxy clusters are located at the same distance in the depth direction irrespective of the location on the sky. (Credit: NAOJ)

Furthermore, the team used the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) on the Subaru Telescope and the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini-North to confirm the precise distances of 137 galaxies associated with the galaxy clusters revealed by HSC (Figure 2). It is found that the supercluster is a complex large-scale structure not only over the vast projected area but also along the line-of-sight direction in 3D. The galaxies spread over the 160 million light-years seem to be independent due to the vast area, however, the spectroscopic observations tell us that the galaxies formed simultaneously and then evolve along with the growth of large-scale structures. 

Our Galaxy is a member of Local Group on the outskirts of Virgo Galaxy Cluster. A team led by an astronomer from the University of Hawaii recently revealed that the Virgo Cluster is a member of a more extended enormous large-scale structure named the Laniakea Supercluster. "The supercluster we discovered 7.3 billion years ago may grow to be a huge large-scale structure similar to Laniakea where we live" said Hayashi. 

These results were published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan (Hayashi et al., "The whole picture of the large-scale structure of the CL1604 supercluster at z∼0.9"). A preprint is available here.

Links

• Gemini Helps Map Larger than Expected Structure of Ancient Supercluster (Press Release from Gemini Observatory) 

Source: Subaru Telescope

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Approaching the Universe’s origins

PSZ2 G138.61-10.84

Credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

This intriguing image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called PSZ2 G138.61-10.84, about six billion light-years away. Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space, but rather aggregated in groups, clusters and superclusters. The latter span over hundreds of millions of light-years and contain billions of galaxies.

Our own galaxy, for example, is part of the Local Group, which in turn is part of the giant Laniakea Supercluster. It was thanks to Hubble that we were able to study massive galactic superstructures such as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall; a giant galaxy cluster that contains billions of galaxies and extends 10 billion light-years across — making it the biggest known structure in the Universe.

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.

Source: ESA/Hubble/Potw