A little over 12 billion years ago, more than seven billion years before the Earth and Sun had formed, there was an epoch that marked the Universe's peak of star formation as well as black hole growth. It's during this period that the black holes that lie at the heart of every galaxy were expanding to supermassive proportions. The brightest and most active of these are called quasars, for "quasi-stellar radio source." These can be, on their own, up to 100 times brighter than the combined light from our own Milky Way galaxy's 200-400 billion stars.
To shine so brightly, they need to feed on an incredible amount of matter, producing light as the infalling material heats up due to friction. Where this material comes from is not well understood, but a new study using the Hubble Space Telescope may have an answer.
One model held that quasars are formed when two galaxies collide. The mash-up of both galaxies’ material could cause a lot of it to fall in towards the new galaxy’s core, thus providing fuel for the quasar. This material is normally held in place by angular momentum, but its orbital path can get disrupted as the two galaxies move through each other, leading it to fall in towards the core of the newly-merged galaxy.
Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment