The ALMA telescope has just captured a chilling image nearly 13 billion years ago, in which filaments of death gas are ‘slaughtering’ a galaxy.
What spews out giant filaments of high-speed gas is a quasar – an extremely bright monster black hole that is devouring matter – named J2054-0005. The “victim” galaxy lost its ability to form stars due to the devastating attack.
According to an article published in a scientific journal Astrophysical Journal, These molecular gas streams are made of oxygen bonded to hydrogen. They are the main fuel for star formation.
However, when a set of black holes shoots too fast into the galaxy, developing stars can be “overfed”. That causes the possibility of star formation to decrease sharply in areas with quasars.
Theo Live Science, The chilling moment mentioned above was captured by the ALMA Telescope, a giant, powerful radio observation network located in Chile.
With “enormous” vision, ALMA looked straight at the world just 900 million years after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. The Big Bang occurred more than 13.8 billion years ago.
Because light needs time to travel relative to distance, the devastating event mentioned above is an image of 13 billion years ago, in a place that was once light years away from Earth.
In reality, if galaxies or black holes still exist, they have been pushed very far away by the expansion of the universe. It’s even more likely that both have long since disappeared.
However, thanks to the delay in the recorded images, ALMA accidentally let humanity see everything that happened in the early universe nearly 13 billion years ago.
New findings from ALMA may partly explain some recent observations showing that the early universe had many faint galaxies that looked like ghosts. It is possible that they were attacked by wild quasars in the universe 13 billion years ago, leading to poor star formation.
Besides pushing gas out with powerful beams of light, quasars can also throw nearby matter away at speeds close to the speed of light thanks to their terrible rotation speed.
With all the confirmed phenomena related to quasar J2054-0005, the research team led by Associate Professor Dragan Salak from Hokkaido University (Japan) hopes astronomers will find many such quasars. more in the future, with increasingly modern tools.
They will help understand in more detail the shining hearts of the universe’s first galaxies, the absurdly huge monster black holes that shook long-standing astronomical theories.