Some of the gas sent gas away from the supermassive black hole — which is located in the center of the galaxy cluster SDSS J1531+3414 (SDSS J1531 for short) — by the eruption eventually cooled enough to form numerous clusters of stars.
SDSS J1531 is a massive galaxy cluster containing hundreds of individual galaxies and huge reservoirs of hot gas and dark matter.
In the heart of SDSS J1531, two of the cluster’s largest galaxies are colliding with each other.
Surrounding these merging giants is a set of 19 large clusters of stars, called superclusters, arranged in an ‘S’ formation that resembles beads on a string.
Dr. Osase Omoruyi from the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics and her colleagues used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the LOFAR radio network and other telescopes to unravel how this unusual chain of star clusters likely formed.
Their discovery of evidence for an ancient, titanic eruption in SDSS J1531 provided a vital clue.
The eruption likely occurred when the supermassive black hole in the center of one of the large galaxies 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.
“We are already looking at this system as it existed 4 billion years ago, not long after the Earth formed,” Dr. Omoruyi said.
“This ancient cavity, a fossil of the black hole’s effect on the host galaxy and its surroundings, tells us about a key event that happened nearly 200 million years earlier in the cluster’s history.”
The evidence for a cavity comes from ‘wings’ of bright X-ray emission, seen with Chandra, tracing dense gas near the center of SDSS J1531.
These wings make up the edge of the cavity and the less dense gas in between is part of the cavity.
LOFAR shows radio waves from the remains of the jet’s energetic particles filling in the giant cavity.
Together, these data provide compelling evidence of an ancient,…
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