Supermassive black holes affect star formation

A team of European astronomers led by Professor Kalliopi Dasyra of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, under the participation of Dr. Thomas Bisbas, University of Cologne modeled several emission lines in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT). ) observations to measure gas pressure in jet-affected clouds and surrounding clouds. With this unprecedented measurement, published recently in Natural Astronomy, they found that the bursts significantly changed the internal and external pressures of the molecular cloud in its path. Depending on which of the two pressures changes the most, both cloud compression and star formation triggers and cloud dissipation and star formation delays are possible in the same galaxy. “Our results suggest that supermassive black holes, even though they are located at the center of galaxies, can influence star formation across galaxies” said Professor Dasyra, adding that “studying the impact of pressure changes on cloud stability is key to the success of this project. Once some stars actually form.” in the wind, it is usually very difficult to detect their signal above the signal of all the other stars in the galaxy that hosts the wind.”

It is believed that supermassive black holes are located at the center of most galaxies in our universe. When particles that fall into these black holes are trapped by magnetic fields, they can be ejected outward and travel deep within the galaxy in the form of very hefty jets of plasma. These beams are often perpendicular to the galactic disk. But in IC 5063, a galaxy 156 million light-years away, the rays actually spread out within the disk, interacting with a dense, cold cloud of molecular gas. From this interaction, compression of jet-affected clouds is theorized to be possible, leading to gravitational instability and eventual star formation due to gas condensation.

For the experiments, the team used carbon monoxide (CO) and formyl cation (HCO+) emissions provided by ALMA, and ionized sulfur and ionized nitrogen emissions provided by VLT. They then used a sophisticated and innovative astrochemical algorithm to pinpoint environmental conditions in the outflow and in the surrounding medium. These environmental conditions contain information about the strength of the star’s far ultraviolet radiation, the speed at which relativistically charged particles ionize the gas, and the mechanical energy stored in the gas by the emission. Narrowing these conditions reveals gas densities and temperatures that describe different parts of this galaxy, which are then used to apply pressure.

“We have performed thousands of astrochemical simulations to cover the various possibilities of IC 5063” said co-author Dr. Thomas Bisbas, DFG Fellow from the University of Cologne and former postdoctoral researcher at the National Observatory of Athens. The challenging part of this work is carefully identifying as many physical constraints on the examined range as each parameter can have. “In this way, we can obtain the optimal combination of the physical parameters of clouds at different locations of the galaxy,” said co-author Mr. Georgios Filippos Paraschos, Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and a former Master’s student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

In fact, the pressure was not only measured for a few locations on IC 5063. Instead, a map of this and other numbers at the center of this galaxy was created. This map allows the author to visualize how gas properties transition from one location to another due to the jet path. The team is currently looking forward to the next big step of the project: using the James Webb Space Telescope for further investigations of pressure in the outer cloud layers, such as those investigated by warm H2. “We are very excited to get the JWST data,” said Professor Dasyra, “because the data will allow us to study jet-cloud interactions with incredible resolution.”

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