New research suggests that in massive galaxies, the central black hole –those strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order –is like a parasite that ultimately grows and kills off star formation. Although many theories have been proposed to explain this process, known as “quenching,” a new study concludes that the growth rate of black holes must change as galaxies evolve from one stage to the next, suggesting that most of the black hole growth occurs in the “green valley” when galaxies are beginning to quench.
Invisible radio signals from the cosmos have revealed previously unknown phenomena from prebiotic molecules in a starburst about 250 million light-years from Earth to the true rotation of Mercury. But the most famous occurred on August 6, 1967, when a squiggly stretch of high-speed recordings occupying less than a quarter-inch of astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s radio-telescope readouts revealed the first sign of something strange — an unknown cosmic mystery.
To determine the amount of energy or radiation at the center of the Milky Way, researchers had to peer through a galaxy packed with more than 200 billion stars and harbors dark patches of interstellar dust and gas. University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor Bob Benjamin—a leading expert on the structure of stars and gas in the Milky Way– was taking a look at two decades’ worth of data when he spotted a scientific red flag —a peculiar shape poking out of the Milky Way’s dark, dusty center rippling with highly-energized ionized hydrogen moving in the direction of Earth.
A gargantuan black hole, known as J2157, 34 billion times the mass of our sun mass, and about 8,000 times bigger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, gorges on nearly the equivalent of one sun every day, according to Dr. Christopher Onken at The Australian National University (ANU) about a monster of the early universe that brings an end to time and space and the laws of physics. If the Milky Way’s black hole wanted to grow to that size, “it would have to swallow two thirds of all the stars in our Galaxy,” he added.
“Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web,” says Vanderbilt’s Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and former astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about the location of absolute stillness in our solar system, the center of gravity with which to measure the gravitational waves that signal the existence of the invisible paradoxes we call black holes, which have no memory, and contain the earliest memories of the universe.
“These objects look like gas and behave like stars,” said co-author Andrea Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group about a new class of bizarre objects with orbits ranging from about 100 to 1,000 years at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that look compact most of the time and stretch out when their orbits bring them closest to the black hole.
