“Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe,” wrote science-fiction author Robert Coover, “outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close…these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order.”
But occasionally, in cosmic evolution, as in Earthly evolution, a freak, a quiescent mutant occurs. In a star cluster without an active supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy actively pumping energy into its surroundings, the gas can cool enough so a prodigious rate of star formation –a “Cambrian explosion” of star creation–can occur, according to Carter Rhea, at the University of Montreal about what can happen when a giant black hole does not intervene in the life of a galaxy cluster. “This kind of black hole shut down may be a crucial way for stars to form in the early Universe.”
Largest Structures in the Universe
Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity. They are made up of three main features: hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies, unseen dark matter, and a vast amount of hot gas that gives off X-rays.
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes have shown that passive black hole behavior in the galaxy cluster SpARCS104922.6+564032.5 (SpARCS1049 for short) located 9.9 billion light years away from Earth results in a prodigious torrent of star formation.
“A Supermassive Valve” –Emitting Hot, X-ray Gas
Galaxy clusters contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies pervaded by hot, X-ray emitting gas that outweighs the combined mass of all the galaxies. Ejections of material powered by a supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy usually prevent this hot gas from cooling to form vast numbers of stars. This heating allows supermassive black holes to influence or control the activity and evolution of their host cluster.
A Behemoth –“That Brings an End to Time and Space and the Laws of Physics”
900 New Suns Per Year
Based on observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers had previously discovered stars were forming at an extraordinary rate of about 900 new Suns worth of mass per year in SpARCS1049. This is over 300 times faster than the rate at which our galaxy, the Milky Way, is forming its stars at a pedestrian rate of 3 solar masses per year. (At the rate seen in SpARCS1049, all of the stars in the Milky Way could form in just 100 million years, which is a short period of time compared to our Galaxy’s age of more than ten billion years.)
“It reminds me of the old expression of ‘when the cat’s away, the mice will play,'” said Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the University of Montreal in Canada, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics of Black Holes and led the study. “Here the cat, or black hole, is quiet and the mice, or stars, are very busy.”
Cooler Gas Sparks Star Formation
Astronomers have been asking: what is causing this prodigious cycle of star birth? The answer may come from new Chandra data revealing the behavior of the hot gas about 80,000 light years away from the center of SpARCS1049 in a region outside any of the cluster’s galaxies. In most of the cluster, the temperature of the gas is about 65 million degrees. However, at the site of star formation the gas is denser than average and has cooled off to a temperature of only about 10 million degrees. The presence of this cooler gas suggests that other undetected gas reservoirs have cooled to even lower temperatures that enable huge numbers of stars to form.
While there are many examples where energy injected by black holes into their surroundings is responsible for reducing the rate of star formation by factors of tens or thousands or more, these clusters are typically only a few hundred million light years from Earth and are much older than SpARCS1049.
Supermassive Black Holes –“Could Actually Be Enigmatic Dark-Energy Objects”
Missing Signs of a Supermassive Black Hole
In the case of SpARCS1049, astronomers do not see any signs that a supermassive black hole in the central galaxy is actively pulling in matter. For example, there is no evidence for a jet of material blowing away from the black hole at radio wavelengths, or of an X-ray source from the middle of the galaxy indicating that matter was heated as it fell towards a black hole.
“Many astronomers have thought that without the intervention from a black hole, the formation of stars would run out of control,” said co-author Tracy Webb of McGill, who first discovered SpARCS1049 in 2015 with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. “Now we have observational proof that this is indeed what takes place.”
Why is the black hole so quiet? The observed difference in position between the densest gas and the central galaxy might be the cause. This would mean that the supermassive black hole in the center of this galaxy is being starved for fuel. The loss of a fuel source for the black hole prevents outbursts and allows the gas to cool without impediment, with the densest gas cooling the fastest. One explanation for this offset is that two smaller galaxy clusters collided at some point in the past to create SpARCS1049, moving the densest gas away from the central galaxy.
A paper describing these results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Chandra X-Ray Observatory and NASA
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/Univ. of Montreal/J. Hlavacek-Larrondo et al; Optical/IR: NASA/STScI
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