Supermassive black holes outgrow their galaxies

Supermassive black holes outgrow their galaxies

The growth of the largest black holes in space is ahead of the rate of star formation in native galaxies. The new study is based on data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The top image conveys the Deep South Chandra Field. This is the most distant look in X-rays (blue). The information was combined with optical and IR images from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green and blue). Each Chandra source is created by hot gas falling into a central supermassive black hole.

The researchers decided to compare the growth rate of a supermassive black hole with the rate of stellar birth in a host galaxy. It turned out that the first indicators are ahead of the second ones in more massive galaxies: for representatives from 100 billion stars 10 times higher than for galaxies with 10 billion stars. For the analysis, galaxies were used with a distance of 4.3-12.2 billion light years.

In parallel, another scientific team independently examined 72 galaxies located in the centers of galactic clusters at a distance of 3.5 billion years from us. Their conclusions are that the massiveness of black holes is 10 times greater than the masses of the previous study. Chandra data, Australian telescope radio data, and Very Large Telescope data were used to obtain data.

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