Black holes are killing our Universe | Cosmic Void

The universe as we know it from our limited and biased vision is dying. The “whole” gets bigger, the distances between galaxies increase at an ever-increasing rate, and if that’s not enough, the galaxies don’t form as many stars as before. And why did they slow down the pace of training? There will be no new galaxies created due to lack of fuel, only 10% of the gas existing in all space has turned into stars. And the mass in the form of planets is a thousand times less, there is much more material for the formation of more worlds. But something is stopping the gas between galaxies, or the gas within galaxies, from creating new suns and new planets (and more life?), at least at the same rate as before.

The most likely culprit for this universe-killing phenomenon is the action of a supermassive black hole, which we think lies at the center of all galaxies. The theory is not at all obvious. Because these monsters, although they have a mass of millions or billions of the mass of our Sun, are quite small in size compared to the galaxy.

For example, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is smaller than the orbit of Venus. If these supermassive black holes are beyond galactocide Widespread throughout the Universe, we are talking about something quite small on a galactic scale, let alone on a cosmic scale, affecting areas billions of times larger, galaxies, and changing the entire Universe. It is as if an atom could stop the growth of a person, the size ratio is similar, and put an end to the entire human race and all life in expansion.

There is evidence collected over decades that tells us that the energy that can be produced around supermassive black holes is enormous. The black hole itself affects spacetime so much that everything is distorted, even time is distorted and distorted. For. We often say that even light cannot escape its gravity, although this is an outdated view of the concept of gravity, which has been surpassed by general relativity. But it conveys the idea that even something that seems formidable, such as a photon, cannot escape the hole in spacetime that a black hole creates.

If something passes close to a black hole, although not so close that it cannot escape, be it a cloud of interstellar gas or a star, it will form a disk around the dark monster. This means that he will be torn apart, it is often said that a person would turn into spaghetti next to a black hole. In this case, matter is heated to such temperatures that it can emit light with an intensity equal to or even greater than that of the rest of the galaxy, which is home to a supermassive black hole, which can have billions of times more mass but remain eclipsed.

When the material around a black hole, known as an accretion disk, becomes super-luminous, the galaxy is said to have an active galactic nucleus, AGN is an acronym in English, “ageene” in astrophysics slang. Using synecdoche, it is sometimes called an agen when we refer to the galaxy in which the agen is located. In the case of quasars, the most extreme agens, we see only that disk of material around the black hole whose brightness completely outshines that of the rest of the host galaxy.

Agenin also sometimes exhibits a phenomenon that releases large amounts of energy not only in the form of light, but also by ejecting material at close to the speed of light. It’s not the material “inside” the black hole that can’t escape, but the stuff that lies just beyond the “point of no return” that we call the event horizon. The ejected material is called jets, which can travel over distances of tens to more than hundreds of times the size of a galaxy such as the Milky Way. This is the case with Porphyrion, whose discovery became known only a few weeks ago. The ejection of material can also occur because the black hole’s surroundings are so bright that the light itself repels the surrounding gas. This light can push things like wind on a sail, and it is extraordinary!

While the agent certainly releases large amounts of energy and has been shown to eject significant amounts of very hot gas present in the black hole’s vicinity over supergalactic distances, there is still no direct evidence that it can affect the gas of an entire galaxy. and less cold gas, which is necessary for star formation and fills the space between stars inside the galaxy, very far from the supermassive black hole.

Astrophysicists know what needs to be tested to confirm a theory, but constructing an experiment is not so easy. We must look for suitable galaxies in which galacticide is occurring, either imminent or very recent. And to do this, like detectives, we must collect information about the health of many galaxies and select the most interesting ones to obtain more data.

But it is not enough to choose well which galaxy to use as a guinea pig; you need to have a super-powerful telescope like JWST. Finding more direct evidence that supermassive black holes are killing our universe is one of the scientific goals of the James Webb Space Telescope, built by NASA, ESA and CSA (which are the space agencies of the US, Europe and America). Canadian). Spain was very actively involved in the James Webb mission through researchers from the Center Astrobiology (CAB), dependent on the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) and the Supreme Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). And it was a team from CAB, in direct collaboration with the University of Cambridge, that has just published a paper that reveals for the first time cold gas ejected from a dying galaxy in the young Universe. This is “Pablo’s Galaxy”, there was a press release from Nature about it, I submitted it and defended it so that it could be selected by the international team that collects data using JWST, and then some funny colleague named it (behind my back, Should say).

The galaxy, which for shame would be better called GS10578, turns out to be quite massive, like the Milky Way, and formed very quickly in the young Universe, when it was only 15% of its current age. And in it we saw direct evidence of the galactic-killing nature of supermassive black holes. In GS10578, the black hole is still active, and we measured it spewing out large amounts of cold gas that we don’t actually see, but rather detect because it “fogs” the galaxy by being in one line of sight and absorbing some of the photons. emitted by stars GS10578.

We will continue to look for more evidence of the process by which the agents steal food from galaxies that eventually starve, the fate of dying GS10578 and all other galaxies, including the Milky Way. They will all eventually go out, and the Universe will be left without shining stars, it will become something else that may seem very hostile to us, it will no longer be so ours, although this feeling perhaps only shows how insignificant and limited not only our existence, but also the existence of the Universe is the material that forms the Earth or the Sun itself, as well as other planets and stars that exist in space.

Cosmic Void This is a section in which our knowledge of the Universe is presented qualitatively and quantitatively. Its purpose is to explain the importance of understanding space not only from a scientific, but also from a philosophical, social and economic point of view. The name “cosmic vacuum” refers to the fact that the Universe was and remains largely empty, with less than one atom per cubic meter, despite the fact that our environment, paradoxically, contains quintillions of atoms per meter. cubic, which invites us to think about our existence and the presence of life in the Universe. The section has been compiled. Pablo J. Perez Gonzalezresearcher at the Astrobiology Center, and Eva VillaverDeputy Director of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.