Astronomers from the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona and elsewhere report the detection of a brand new huge protocluster. The construction was discovered round a luminous quasar referred to as J0910–0414. The invention was detailed in a paper revealed February 2 on the pre-print server arXiv.
Galaxy clusters harbor from lots of to 1000’s of galaxies certain collectively by gravity. They’re essentially the most immense gravitationally certain buildings within the universe, and will function wonderful laboratories for finding out galaxy evolution and cosmology.
Astronomers are particularly interested by research of protoclusters of galaxies, the progenitors of clusters. Such objects, discovered at excessive redshifts (over 2.0), might present important details about the early phases of the universe.
Lately, a group of astronomers led by Steward Observatory’s Feige Wang has employed the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope, the Atacama Giant Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and different ground-based amenities, to look at J0910–0414—a luminous quasar at a redshift of 6.63. The quasar hosts one of the huge (about 3.6 billion solar plenty) supermassive black holes at such a excessive redshift. Because of this, it’s a good place to seek for galaxy overdensities and due to this fact new galaxy clusters in addition to the earliest protoclusters.
“The Subaru/HSC observations had been obtained from November 2019 to January 2020. We noticed this quasar area with i2, z and NB926 filters and the on-source publicity occasions are 150 minutes, 240 minutes, and 313 minutes, respectively,” the researchers wrote within the paper.
The observations discovered a protocluster anchored by J0910–0414, which incorporates no less than three carbon [C II] line and 12 Lyhman-alpha emitters (LAEs) on the quasar’s redshift. The photographs additionally present a double-peaked LAE within the neighborhood of the quasar.
Based on the examine, the newfound protocluster is likely one of the most overdense buildings recognized within the early universe. Furthermore, the present-day mass of this construction is estimated to be some 6.9 quadrillion solar masses—due to this fact 3 times higher than the close by Coma cluster. Which means that the protocluster reported within the paper is essentially the most huge one discovered at a redshift increased than 6.0.
Summing up the outcomes, Wang’s group underlined that it’s environment friendly to establish galaxy overdensities by focusing on quasar fields with each ALMA and narrow-band observations, which was proved by the invention of a brand new protocluster.
“Future ALMA mosaic observations, wide-field slim band imaging, and JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] observations of quasars within the EoR [Epoch of Reionization] will permit us to not solely establish galaxy overdensities within the EoR but in addition examine the environmental dependence of galaxy evolution,” the scientists conclude.
Extra info:
Feige Wang et al, A Huge Protocluster Anchored by a Luminous Quasar at z=6.63, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.01844
Journal info:
arXiv
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