With the help of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. The new discovery was published Thursday in Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.
This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the center of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures that contain plenty of gas to fuel them.
"This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects—supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence," wrote Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research in a report by the ESO website.
"The new observations with ESO's VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic "spider's web" of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. "The cosmic web filaments are like spider's web threads. The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments," explained Mignoli.
"The light from this large web-like structure, with its black hole of one billion solar masses, has traveled to us from a time when the Universe was only 0.9 billion years old," said co-author Roberto Gilli, also an astronomer at INAF in Bologna.
