Earliest strands of the cosmic web

Date:
June 29, 2023
Source:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Summary:
Galaxies are not scattered randomly across the universe. They
gather together not only into clusters, but into vast interconnected
filamentary structures with gigantic barren voids in between. This
'cosmic web' started out tenuous and became more distinct over
time as gravity drew matter together.


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==========================================================================
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Galaxies are not scattered randomly across the universe. They gather
together not only into clusters, but into vast interconnected filamentary structures with gigantic barren voids in between. This "cosmic web"
started out tenuous and became more distinct over time as gravity drew
matter together.

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a
thread- like arrangement of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million
years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is
anchored by a luminous quasar -- a galaxy with an active, supermassive
black hole at its core. The team believes the filament will eventually
evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies, much like the well-known Coma Cluster in the nearby universe.

"I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is," said team
member Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "I expected
to find something, but I didn't expect such a long, distinctly thin
structure." "This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that
people have ever found associated with a distant quasar," added Feige
Wang of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the principal investigator
of this program.

This discovery is from the ASPIRE project (A SPectroscopic survey of
biased halos In the Reionization Era), whose main goal is to study the
cosmic environments of the earliest black holes. In total, the program
will observe 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years
after the big bang, a time known as the Epoch of Reionization.

"The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves. ASPIRE aims
to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive
black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure," explained team member Joseph Hennawi of the University of California,
Santa Barbara.

Growing Monsters Another part of the study investigates the properties
of eight quasars in the young universe. The team confirmed that their
central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the
big bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass
of our Sun. Astronomers continue seeking evidence to explain how these
black holes could grow so large so fast.

"To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria
must be satisfied. First, you need to start growing from a massive 'seed'
black hole. Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to
a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter
at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime," explained Wang.

"These unprecedented observations are providing important clues about
how black holes are assembled. We have learned that these black holes
are situated in massive young galaxies that provide the reservoir of
fuel for their growth," said Jinyi Yang of the University of Arizona,
who is leading the study of black holes with ASPIRE.

Webb also provided the best evidence yet of how early supermassive black
holes potentially regulate the formation of stars in their galaxies. While supermassive black holes accrete matter, they also can power tremendous outflows of material. These winds can extend far beyond the black hole
itself, on a galactic scale, and can have a significant impact on the
formation of stars.

"Strong winds from black holes can suppress the formation of stars in
the host galaxy. Such winds have been observed in the nearby universe
but have never been directly observed in the Epoch of Reionization,"
said Yang. "The scale of the wind is related to the structure of the
quasar. In the Webb observations, we are seeing that such winds existed
in the early universe." These results were published in two papers in
The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29.

* RELATED_TOPICS
o Space_&_Time
# Black_Holes # Galaxies # Astrophysics # Astronomy #
Stars # Cosmology # Big_Bang # Cosmic_Rays
* RELATED_TERMS
o Dark_matter o Galaxy o Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos o
Galaxy_formation_and_evolution o Supergiant o Globular_cluster
o Shape_of_the_Universe o Open_cluster

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
NASA/Goddard_Space_Flight_Center. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Feige Wang, Jinyi Yang, Joseph F. Hennawi, Xiaohui Fan, Fengwu Sun,
Jaclyn B. Champagne, Tiago Costa, Melanie Habouzit, Ryan Endsley,
Zihao Li, Xiaojing Lin, Romain A. Meyer, Jan-Torge Schindler,
Yunjing Wu, Eduardo Ban~ados, Aaron J. Barth, Aklant K. Bhowmick,
Rebekka Bieri, Laura Blecha, Sarah Bosman, Zheng Cai, Luis
Colina, Thomas Connor, Frederick B. Davies, Roberto Decarli,
Gisella De Rosa, Alyssa B. Drake, Eiichi Egami, Anna-Christina
Eilers, Analis E. Evans, Emanuele Paolo Farina, Zoltan Haiman,
Linhua Jiang, Xiangyu Jin, Hyunsung D. Jun, Koki Kakiichi,
Yana Khusanova, Girish Kulkarni, Mingyu Li, Weizhe Liu, Federica
Loiacono, Alessandro Lupi, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Masafusa Onoue,
Maria A. Pudoka, Sofi'a Rojas-Ruiz, Yue Shen, Michael A. Strauss,
Wei Leong Tee, Benny Trakhtenbrot, Maxime Trebitsch, Bram Venemans,
Marta Volonteri, Fabian Walter, Zhang-Liang Xie, Minghao Yue,
Haowen Zhang, Huanian Zhang, Siwei Zou. A SPectroscopic Survey
of Biased Halos in the Reionization Era (ASPIRE): JWST Reveals a
Filamentary Structure around a z = 6.61 Quasar. The Astrophysical
Journal Letters, 2023; 951 (1): L4 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/accd6f ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230629173611.htm

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