Posted on 11/30/2009 7:20:07 PM PST by bruinbirdman
The new research may help explain why large galaxies tend to have super-massive black holes at their cores.
Astronomers have long wanted an answer to the chicken-and-egg question of what comes first, a super-massive black hole or the stars surrounding it.
A new observation of a far away object five billion light years from Earth may now help to solve the riddle.
The object is a quasar, a powerful source of energy believed to mark the location of an active giant black hole.
Nothing that gets close enough to a black hole can escape its powerful gravity. However, material swirling around the edge of a black hole can radiate enormous amounts of energy.
Radiation from the quasar was being emitted when the universe was little more than a third of its present age.
To their surprise, the astronomers found that unlike most quasars, this one was ''naked'' and not situated at the centre of a galaxy. However, there was a companion galaxy close to it creating new stars at a frantic rate equivalent to about 350 suns per year.
The galaxy was effectively ''under fire'' from jets of high energy particles and fast moving gas shooting out of the quasar, the scientists found.
The stream of material was likely to be fuelling star formation in the galaxy, the scientists believe. In effect, the quasar was building its own host galaxy.
At a later stage the quasar was expected to end up at the galaxy's centre.
''The two objects are bound to merge in the future: the quasar is moving at a speed of only a few tens of thousands of kilometres per hour with respect to the companion galaxy and their separation is only about 22,000 light-years,'' said lead scientist Dr David Elbaz, from the CEA research
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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You believe any of that?
I don't know. It's either this or that Big Bang God Machine in Switzerland.
And I'm agin the God Machine.
yitbos
There has never been a big bang and there is no such thing as a “black hole”. Google searches on “Halton Arp” will clear up at least part of it.
When you consider the energies and vast distances involved it sure makes our problems here look mighty puny by comparison.Actually, if there is a "mighty hand" involved, then he must care more for the "puny" souls on earth than all the massive (possibly lifeless) galaxies in the sky.Behold his mighty hand...
Don't judge "puny" by physical size. (Not if you're thinking in terms of what a "mighty hand" might consider important.)
Your position assumes that the universe cares about time. A human folly.
Maybe it’s a big recycling center. It sucks in stuff from this universe and spit it back out all cleaned up in another universe! :)
bttt
>>by attracting and concentrating matter in its neighborhood.
attracting, concentrating... or creating matter from massive amounts of localized energy.
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