???? These quasars playing hide and seek

2023-11-12 05:00:15

Quasars, extremely luminous objects at the heart of galaxies, arouse the interest of astronomers. A recent study, led by the University of Durham, highlights an intriguing discovery: quasars can be obscured by dense clouds of gas and dust not just in their environment (The environment is everything around us. It is the set of natural elements and…) immediate, but also in the host galaxy itself. This discovery challenges the common idea that quasars are only obscured by dust rings close to the black hole.
Artistic illustration of a torus of thick dust surrounding a supermassive black hole (In astrophysics, a supermassive black hole is a black hole whose mass is approximately one million…).
Credit: University of Durham

Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have analyzed very dusty quasars in compact galaxies, known as “starburst galaxies”, producing more than 1,000 stars per year. These galaxies, rich in gas and dust, the basic elements of stars, can completely (Completely or completely automatic, or even by English completion or…) hide the quasar (A “source of quasi-stellar radiation” ( quasar), (quasi-stellar radio…).

Carolina Andonie, a doctoral student at the Center for Extragalactic Astronomy at the University of Durham, lead author of the study, explains that this obscuration might represent an early evolutionary phase of galaxies, marked by high rates of star formation and black hole growth.

Illustration of sources of obscuration. Orange clouds represent dust and gas near the central black hole, and blue clouds with stars represent dust and gas in the forming galaxy (In intonation, changes in fundamental frequency are perceived as variations of. ..) the stars. The blue color gradient represents the quantity; a scalar,…) of gas and dust in the galaxy, from a little (transparent) to a lot (opaque).
Credit: University of Durham

These buried quasars might therefore reveal new links between the growth of galaxies and the activity of supermassive black holes. The discovery highlights a turbulent and disordered phase of galactic evolution, during which gas and stars collide and clump together at the center of the galaxy.

The full study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). It offers new insights into the relationship between galaxy growth and black hole activity.

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