The lifespan of a galaxy can be extended by the presence of a supermassive black hole, which provides the “heart and lungs” that allow the galaxy to “breathe” and keep it from becoming too large.
This is an implication of new research which suggests that if the universe were to age more quickly, it would be filled with “zombie” galaxies containing dead or dying stars. Supermassive black hole It is believed to be at the center of every giant galaxy. The astrophysicists behind the discovery said: Gas and radiation jet That super huge Black Hole They blow from their poles into the airways that feed our lungs.
The University of Kent crew are thinking about their own pulse Black Hole “Heart” This creates a shock front that oscillates back and forth across both jets, similar to how the thoracic diaphragm moves up and down within the chest cavity to inflate and deflate the lungs.
In the galaxy, this breathing-like action Jets erupting from supermassive black holes “In the same way that we exhale warm air into the cold air on a cold winter’s morning, we can pump air into the surrounding medium. As interstellar gas clouds cool and condense, stars form. This means that this “exhale” could slow down star formation and inhibit the growth of our galaxy.”
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The team came to this conclusion after analysing simulations that recreated the effect of a supersonic jet ejected from a supermassive black hole disrupting the collapse of Earth’s atmosphere. Galaxy growth. Simulations showed that the heart of a supermassive black hole pulsates, generating high pressure within the jet, roughly the same as in a human suffering from high blood pressure, or “hypertension.”
When this happened, the team observed that the jet began to act like a bellows, firing sound waves that rippled through the surrounding galaxy’s gas and dust material.
Two different simulations of a black hole jet being ejected into a galactic medium of gas and dust. (Image credit: C Richards/MD Smith/University of Kent)
“We realised there must be some way that the jets are supporting the gas around the galaxy, and this is what we found in the computer simulations,” says team member Karl Richards, a PhD student at the University of Kent. He said in a statement. “Analyzing computer simulations of high pressure and pulsating hearts revealed unexpected behavior.”
This sent a pulsating current into the high-pressure jet, causing the jet’s shape to change as a result of the bellows-like action of the oscillating jet shock wave. The researchers added that these jets expanded “like lungs filled with air.” In doing so, the jets sent pressure ripples into the surrounding galaxy’s material, halting the growth of the galaxy in their simulations.
An illustration showing sound waves (ripples) in the hot gas that fills the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. The ripples are thought to be generated by cavities blown out by jets from a supermassive black hole, the bright white dot at the galaxy’s center. (Image courtesy: NASA/NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
In addition to the team’s simulations, there is some evidence of this phenomenon in real galaxies, such as the Perseus Cluster of Galaxy Astronomers have found evidence of giant gas bubbles in this collection of thousands of galaxies shrouded in a vast gas cloud that heats up to millions of degrees. These are thought to be the result of sound waves rippling through the cluster’s galactic medium.
Achieving a balance between black hole activity and the inflow of gas into a galaxy is extremely difficult, but supermassive black holes require a steady supply of gas and dust to produce their jets.
“If we breathe too fast or too slow, we won’t be able to produce the life-giving tremors needed to sustain galactic matter and keep our heart fueled at the same time,” team member Michael Smith, a researcher at the University of Kent, said in a statement. “But achieving this is not easy, and is constrained by the type of pulsation, the size of the black hole, the quality of our lungs, and more.”
The team concluded that a galaxy’s lifespan can be extended with the help of the “heart” of a supermassive black hole and the “lungs” of jets that erupt from the black hole’s center, and that its growth can be suppressed by limiting the black hole’s lifetime. Amount of gas collapsing into a star From an early stage.
Without this mechanism, many galaxies in the 13.8 billion year old Universe would have run out of fuel for star formation by now. As a result, most galaxies would have “disappeared” and become what is known as “dead.”Red and dead “It’s a zombie galaxy at this point, filled with ancient, burnt-out stars.”
The team’s research was published in the journal Neuroscience on July 12. Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society .
