Gigantic black holes threw their weight around in the earlyuniverse

On 20 Oct, 17:32, Sam Wormley wrote:
Monster Tag Team
* *http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi...ll/2008/1017/1
* *http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/con...017/images/200...

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 October 2008

Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of
colliding galaxies, each harboring a supermassive black hole at its center. The existence
of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang,
suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so,
they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought,
and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets.
Ever since the first black hole, Cygnus X-1, was discovered, astronomers have been adding
to the rolls of these strange cosmic objects, whose tremendous gravity can capture even
light. The heavyweights of the group are supermassive black holes, which cram masses
equaling a million suns or more into a space much smaller than our solar system. These
monsters are supposed to take billions of years to form, because they accumulate all
matter or objects unfortunate enough to pass too close--including other black holes.
Supermassive black holes not only shape their host galaxy but also can determine its
potential habitability, depending on whether they form quietly or flood the vicinity with
lethal radiation and destructive jets of ionized gas.

An international team was looking for new information about a bright, radio-emitting
galaxy called 4C60.07, located about 12 billion light-years away. The researchers were
stunned when they pointed the Submillimeter radio telescope array located on Mauna Kea,
Hawaii, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 4C60.07's direction. Not only is 4C60.07
actually a pair of galaxies in the process of merging, the team reports in an upcoming
issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society, but both galaxies also sport
supermassive black holes.

Until now, supermassive black holes that far away from Earth were thought to be extremely
rare. "We could count them on our fingers," says astronomer and lead author Rob Ivison of
the U.K. Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh. That assumption is no longer valid, he
says, "because the second galaxy was not targeted for any special reason yet also contains
a black hole large enough to have a major influence" on its evolution.

"We're certain both galaxies have black holes," says astronomer and co-author Steven
Willner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"The colors of the two galaxies are too red for the light to be coming from stars alone,"
he says. "Instead, much of the light has to be coming from the accretion disks around
black holes."

"The long-standing question is whether galaxy and black-hole formation started at about
the same time in the universe," says astronomer Chris Willott of the National Research
Council Canada in Victoria, British Columbia. "These observations tell us that they did.”
Additionally, astronomer David Sanders of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, says the
discovery shows that given the right environment--with enough surrounding dust and
gas--galaxies can evolve very quickly, in this case in less than 2 billion years.

Could I ask one difficult question. What determines the mass
distribution of primordial black holes. Did smaller BHs form and
coalese to provide supermassive BHs?


- Ian Parker