Quasar tsunami is responsible for the formation of massive galaxies

Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the most energetic outflows of matter ever observed in the universe. These outflows come from the surroundings of the quasars and traverse the interstellar space like a tsunami, spreading real destruction in their home galaxies.

Quasars are extremely distant space objects that emit huge amounts of energy. Inside the quasars are supermassive black holes fueled by falling matter, which can be up to 1000 times brighter than an entire galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars.

While the black hole absorbs matter, the surrounding hot gas emits intense radiation that is visible from cosmic distances as a quasar. Winds powered by high pressure radiation from the black hole's surroundings repel matter from the center of the galaxy. Radiated matter reaches speeds of several percent of the speed of light.

No other phenomenon releases so much mechanical energy. During 10 million years, quasar effluents emit a million times more energy than a flash of gamma radiation. The amount of mechanical energy emitted by the outflows is several hundred times greater than the brightness of the entire Milky Way - says Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Quasar winds dissipate throughout the galaxy's disk. The matter from which new stars could potentially have arisen is blown out of the inner regions of the galaxy towards its edges, which means that star-forming processes cease in the immediate vicinity of the quasar.

When such a specific cosmic tsunami hits interstellar matter, the temperature at the head of the shockwave rises to billions of degrees, and matter begins to glow first in the X-ray range, and then in the rest of the spectrum.

Numerical simulations of the evolution of galaxies indicate that such a movement of matter may explain why we observe so few large galaxies in the universe and where the relationship between the mass of the galaxy and the mass of its central black hole comes from.

Both observers and theorists have known for decades that there must be a physical process that inhibits the formation of new stars in massive galaxies, but so far we have not known what this process is. The introduction of the outflows of matter we observed into the simulation completely solves this puzzle - says Jeremiah P. Ostriker from Columbia University in New York.

During their research, astronomers studied 13 different quasars, in which they were able to measure the velocities of gas accelerated by quasar winds. To do this, researchers had to analyze the traces in the spectrum of glowing gas. The ultraviolet data collected by Hubble showed that the characteristic absorption lines of matter along the line of sight were significantly shifted, which means that matter moves at a very high speed. Only Hubble is able to observe the UV range with the accuracy that allows the above discovery.

In addition to measuring the most energetic quasars, researchers found one accelerator more than the others.

In just three years, the matter accelerated from 69 million km / h to 75 million km / h

Scientists suspect that its speed will continue to increase.

Ultraviolet observations conducted with the Hubble Space Telescope allow us to track different ranges of energy emitted by quasars, from cooler to extremely hot and ionized gas. Such strong quasar winds can tell us a lot about the relationship between the growth of the supermassive black hole and the development of the entire galaxy it is in, '' says Gerard Kriss of the Baltimore Space Telescope Institute.

Scientists have just published the results of their research in the Astrophysical Journal Supplements .



Quasar tsunami is responsible for the formation of massive galaxies

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