A team of astronomers from the universities of Texas and Arizona have discovered a large black hole growing rapidly at the center of one of the most extreme galaxies known in the early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy, with the black hole at its center, provides new clues about the formation of the first supermassive black holes. The new work has just been published in 'Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society'. Using the ALMA (Large Millimeter Array) radio telescope, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, researchers determined that the galaxy, labeled COS-87259 and located just 750 million light years from the Big Bang (when the Universe was barely 5% of its current age), is capable of forming stars at a rate 1,000 times greater than our Milky Way, and containing more than a billion solar masses in the form of interstellar dust. The speed with which it creates new suns, together with the greed of the central black hole that accumulates a huge amount of burning matter around it, makes the galaxy extremely bright. Due to its characteristics, researchers believe that this black hole belongs to a completely new category. One that involves a supermassive black hole almost completely enveloped by 'cosmic dust', causing almost all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team has also discovered that this rapidly growing supermassive black hole is generating a strong jet of material moving at nearly the speed of light through the host galaxy. Something that is particularly surprising about this new object is that it was identified in a patch of sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon, much smaller than what is usually used to detect similar objects. Which suggests that it could have thousands of other similar galaxies nearby. A surprise for scientists. The only class of supermassive black holes known so far in the early Universe were quasars, which are active black holes that are not obscured by cosmic dust. But quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to COS-87259, with only a few dozen located across the entire sky. Therefore, the surprising discovery of COS-87259 and its black hole raises numerous questions about the abundance of very early supermassive black holes, as well as the types of galaxies in which they typically form. Ryan Endsley, lead author of the paper, says: "These results suggest that very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, perhaps as a consequence of intense star formation activity in their host galaxies. "This is something that others have been predicting for years, and it's really nice to have the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario." MORE INFORMATION news No An ancient tomb of two brothers reveals that cranial surgeries were already performed 3,500 years ago news Yes New secrets of Ryugu, the asteroid older than the Sun, are revealed «While no one expected to find this type of object in the early Universe "Concludes Endsley, their discovery is a step towards a much better understanding of how black holes of billions of solar masses could form so early in the life of the Universe, as well as how the most massive galaxies first evolved." .
