Scientists spot earliest-known supermassive black hole 'storm'

Artist’s illustration of a galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole located in the center of a galaxy. The intense energy emanating from the black hole creates a huge flow of gas that blows away the interstellar matter that is the material for forming stars.

(Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

A massive maelstrom that raged in the universe's youth could help scientists better understand how galaxies and their central black holes interact.

Most, if not all, galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole at their core. Our own Milky Way has one, for example — a behemoth known as Sagittarius A*, which is about as massive as 4.3 million suns.

Takumi led a team of researchers that dug into these questions. Using the NAOJ's Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, the scientists found more than 100 galaxy-supermassive black hole duos that lie at least 13 billion light-years from Earth, meaning they existed more than 13 billion years ago. (It's taken that long for their light to reach Earth.) The universe was young then, relatively speaking; the Big Bang occurred about 13.82 billion years ago.

"Our observations support recent high-precision computer simulations which have predicted that coevolutionary relationships were in place even at about 13 billion years ago," Izumi said. "We are planning to observe a large number of such objects in the future, and hope to clarify whether or not the primordial coevolution seen in this object is an accurate picture of the general universe at that time."

Michael was a science writer for the Idaho National Laboratory and has been an intern at Wired.com, The Salinas Californian newspaper, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.