Enlarge VLA image (right) of gas in young galaxy
seen as it was when the Universe was only 870 million years old.
Image: NRAO/AUI/NSF, SDSS
Do galaxies form first and then a black hole
springs up in the center, or possibly, do galaxies form around
an already existing black hole? That's the cosmic
chicken-and-the-egg problem astronomers have been trying to
figure out. The answer? "It looks like the black holes form
before the host galaxy, and somehow grow a galaxy around them.
The evidence is piling up," said Chris Carilli, of the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), speaking at today's press
conference at the American Astronomical Society's meeting. By
observing with the Very Large Array radio
telescope and the
Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France at sub-kiloparsec
resolution, the researchers have been "weighing" the earliest
galaxies, ones that formed within a billion years of the Big
Bang.
Previous studies of galaxies and their central black holes in
the nearby Universe revealed an intriguing connection between
the masses of the black holes and of the central "bulges" of
stars and gas in the galaxies. The ratio of the black hole and
the bulge mass is nearly the same for a wide range of galactic
sizes and ages. For central black holes from a few million to
many billions of times the mass of our Sun, the black hole's
mass is about one one-thousandth of the mass of the surrounding
galactic bulge.
"This constant ratio indicates that the black
hole and the bulge affect each others' growth in some sort of
interactive relationship," said Dominik Riechers, of Caltech.
"The big question has been whether one grows before the other or
if they grow together, maintaining their mass ratio throughout
the entire process."
"We finally have been able to measure black-hole
and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the
first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence
suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the
early Universe. The black holes in these young galaxies are much
more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the
nearby Universe," said Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute
for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Germany.
"The implication is that the black holes started
growing first."
The next challenge is to figure out how the black
hole and the bulge affect each others' growth. "We don't know
what mechanism is at work here, and why, at some point in the
process, the 'standard' ratio between the masses is
established," Riechers said.
New telescopes now
under construction will be key tools for unraveling this
mystery, Carilli explained. "The Expanded Very Large Array
(EVLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
(ALMA) will give us dramatic improvements in sensitivity and the
resolving power to image the gas in these galaxies on the small
scales required to make detailed studies of their dynamics," he
said.
"To understand how the Universe got to be the way
it is today, we must understand how the first stars and galaxies
were formed when the Universe was young. With the new
observatories we'll have in the next few years, we'll have the
opportunity to learn important details from the era when the
Universe was only a toddler compared to today's adult," Carilli
said.
Carilli, Riechers and Walter worked with Frank
Bertoldi of Bonn University; Karl Menten of MPIfR; and Pierre
Cox and Roberto Neri of the Insitute for Millimeter Radio
Astronomy (IRAM) in France.
Source: NRAO, AAS
Press Conference