Supermassive black holes are messy feeders, and when they’re gorging on too much material, they can hurl high-energy jets into the surrounding Universe. Astronomers have found one of the most powerful eruptions ever seen, emanating from a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away. The powerful jets are blowing out cavities in intergalactic space and triggering the formation of a huge chain of star clusters.
The black hole is part of a massive galaxy cluster, named SDSS J1531, which contains hundreds of individual galaxies, and all these galaxies have huge reservoirs of hot gas and dark matter. Using several telescopes for multiwavelength observations — including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter and submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Gemini North telescope’s Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), and the Very Large Array (VLA) — astronomers were able to discern that two of the central galaxies were engaged in a major merger. The merger activated the supermassive black hole in the center of one of the large galaxies, which produced an extremely powerful jet. As the jet moved through space, it pushed the surrounding hot gas away from the black hole, creating a gigantic cavity.
The merger and the resulting jets from the black hole created a remarkable and stunning chain of 19 young stellar superclusters wound the two galaxies like a string of beads.
In their paper, the astronomers said the dynamic environment of SDSS J1531 offers an excellent laboratory to study the interplay between mergers, and their multiwavelength studies allowed them to uncover the origin and evolution of the “beads on a string” star formation complex.
“We’ve reconstructed a likely sequence of events in this cluster that occurred over a vast range of distances and times,” said co-author Grant Tremblay, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics CfA). “It began with the black hole a tiny fraction of a light-year across forming a cavity almost 500,000 light-years wide. This single event set in motion the formation of the young star clusters nearly 200 million years later, each a few thousand light-years across.”