Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Part and Black Holes (to the tune of "Night and Day")

Spaceref  has a nice summary of the science news that black holes are not only integral aspects of galaxies, but black holes have always been galactic features -- which some would says shows an organic aspect to galaxies, but not the article we excerpt here, which describes the relation of galaxy and black hole as "symbiotic", like they were not parts of one organism.:

Source: Yale University
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2011

...[D]etecting the giant black holes thought to lurk at the centers ...[of distant] galaxies has proven ...difficult, [until now.]  [A] team of astronomers has discovered the earliest black holes ever detected, despite the fact that they are hidden from view by their host galaxies. They also measured the average growth rate of the black holes and discovered that they grow and evolve in tandem with their galaxies -- something that astronomers had observed locally but which they knew little about when it came to the early, distant universe.

"This finding tells us there is a symbiotic relationship between black holes and their galaxies that has existed since the dawn of time," said Kevin Schawinski, a Yale astronomer who contributed to the discovery.

The team used a technique called "stacking" in order to detect the incredibly weak signals emitted by the galaxies' central black holes, the farthest of which are 13 billion light-years from Earth. Because of their great distance, astronomers see these black holes as they existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. (The universe is currently estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old.)

The astronomers focused on more than 250 galaxies, which had previously been detected by the Hubble Space Telescope and which they thought were good candidates for harboring black holes at their centers. They then piled multiple images taken by the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory on top of each other, essentially multiplying the weak X-ray signals created by the black holes as they devoured nearby gas and dust....

No comments: