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Scientists have new insights into the relationship between the black hole and the host galaxy.
Black holes are thought to absorb so much surrounding material that they end the life of their host galaxy. In this process, they create a high-energy object called a quasar, which was previously thought to stop star formation. Now scientists have discovered a galaxy that survives the “voracious” forces of the quasar and continues to form new stars, about 100 stars the size of the Sun per year.
The discovery of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) could explain how massive galaxies were formed. “This shows us that the growth of active black holes does not immediately stop star formation, contrary to all current scientific predictions,” said Allison Kirkpatrick, assistant professor at the University of Kansas at Lawrence Kansas and co-author of the study.
SOFIA (a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center DLR) studied an extremely distant galaxy located more than 5.25 billion light years from us with the name CQ4479. At its core is a special type of quasar that was recently discovered and is called a “cold quasar”. In this type of quasar, there is an active black hole that still absorbs material from the galaxy that hosts it, but the intense energy of the quasar has not destroyed all the cold gas, so the stars can continue to form and the galaxy can continue. to live. This is the first time that scientists have studied the cold quasar in detail and directly measure the growth of a black hole, the birth rate of stars, and how much cold gas remains to power the galaxy.
Zdroj: Phys,
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