Kevin Schawinski, Meg Urry, Ezequiel Treister, Brooke Simmons, Priyamvada Natarajan, Eilat Glikman
One of the key open questions in cosmology today pertains to understanding
when, where and how super massive black holes form, while it is clear that
mergers likely play a significant role in the growth cycles of black holes, how
supermassive black holes form, and how galaxies grow around them. Here, we
present Hubble Space Telescope WFC3/IR grism observations of a clumpy galaxy at
z=1.35, with evidence for 10^6 - 10^7 Msun rapidly growing black holes in
separate sub-components of the host galaxy. These black holes could have been
brought into close proximity as a consequence of a rare multiple galaxy merger
or they could have formed in situ. Such holes would eventually merge into a
central black hole as the stellar clumps/components presumably coalesce to form
a galaxy bulge. If we are witnessing the in-situ formation of multiple black
holes, their properties can inform seed formation models and raise the
possibility that massive black holes can continue to emerge in star-forming
galaxies as late as z=1.35 (4.8 Gyr after the Big Bang).
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6973
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