LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers may have solved a
cosmic chicken-and-the-egg problem: Which came first — galaxies or the
supermassive black holes in their cores?
For several
years now, researchers have known that galaxies and black holes must
have co-evolved, with budding galaxies feeding material to a growing black
hole while the immense gravity of the black hole generated in its vicinity
tremendous radiation that in turn powered star formation. But the scientists
hadn't pegged the starting point.
"It
looks like black
holes came first. The evidence is piling up," said Chris Carilli of
the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. Carilli presented his
team's findings here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical
Society.
Previous
studies of nearby galaxies revealed an intriguing link between the masses of
the black holes at their centers and the mass of the central
"bulge" (a mass of tightly packed stars and gas) in the galaxies:
The black hole's mass is always about one one-thousandth the mass of the
surrounding bulge.
The ratio
is the same for galaxies of all ages and sizes, whether the central black hole
is a few million or many billions of times the mass of our sun.
"This
constant ratio indicates that the black hole and the bulge affect each others'
growth in some sort of interactive relationship," said study team member
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."
To help
answer this question, Carilli, Riechers and the rest of their team used the Very
Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico and the Plateau de Bure
Interferometer in France to peer back to near the beginning of the universe,
thought to be 13.7 billion years ago, when the first galaxies were forming.
"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," said study team member Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck
Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. "The black holes in these young
galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the
nearby universe."
The upshot:
"The implication is that the black holes started growing first,"
Walter said.
The next
piece to place in the puzzle will be to figure out exactly how black holes and
central bulges affect each others' growth and how the bulges eventually race
past the black holes to become more massive.
"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 currently in the works, including the Expanded Very Large Array and
the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, will be key tools in solving
this mystery, Carilli said.
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