A recent discovery by a team of astronomers centres on a galaxy cluster called CHIPS 1911+4455, located an incredible 6 billion light-years from Earth.
At its heart lies a supermassive black hole that has only recently “turned on”, just a thousand years ago.
While that might sound like a long time, it’s merely a blink of an eye in astronomical terms.
Lead researcher Francesco Ubertosi from the University of Bologna describes the phenomenon as watching a sleeping giant wake up.
The team used the Very Long Baseline Array and Very Large Array telescopes to peer deep into space with remarkable precision, imagine being able to read a newspaper in Los Angeles while standing in New York.
What makes this black hole special is that it’s essentially a newborn in terms of activity. The jets of material it’s shooting out extend only about 100 light years from its center.
While that sounds enormous, it’s actually tiny by black hole standards. Mature black holes in similar systems can create jets stretching for tens of thousands of light years.
Most black holes astronomers study have been active for millions of years, making it difficult to understand how they first begin affecting their surroundings.
This newly awakened black hole provides a unique “before” picture, showing scientists what happens in the earliest stages of black hole activity.
“The jets are so young and small that they haven’t had time to push away the surrounding hot gas, this creates a perfect natural laboratory for studying how black holes first begin to influence their cosmic neighbourhood.” – Co-author Myriam Gitti from University of Bologna.
While the black hole is just waking up, the galaxy around it is anything but sleepy. This galaxy is creating new stars at an astounding rate; between 140 and 190 times the mass of our Sun every single year. To put that in perspective, our entire Milky Way Galaxy only forms about one Sun’s worth of stars annually. The researchers believe they may be witnessing the smoking gun of how black holes get triggered in the first place. The hot gas surrounding this black hole is cooling very efficiently, potentially providing the fuel needed to wake up the black hole.
Understanding how supermassive black holes wake up helps solve fundamental questions about how galaxies evolve.
These black holes play a crucial role in regulating star formation and shaping the largest structures in the universe. By catching one in the act of awakening, it’s possible to finally study this process as it unfolds rather than just seeing the end result.
The discovery required combining observations from multiple telescopes, each providing different pieces of the puzzle. Some offered ultra high resolution to see the tiny jets, while others provided the sensitivity needed to detect faint signals from star formation.
As the research team continues, they hope to watch how it evolves over time and find more similar systems.
This could revolutionise our understanding of how the universe’s most powerful objects first begin to shape the cosmos around them.
Written by Mark Thompson/Universe Today.
