Astronomers have discovered several galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole at a distance that corresponds to the elapsed time since the Big Bang, equal to less than one billion years. The discovery, which explains the mystery of the appearance of giant black holes in the young universe, is reported in an article published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The giant structure was observed using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) optical telescope complex. It is formed by six galaxies that surround a black hole and lie in a web of gas that is 300 times the size of the Milky Way. Streams of matter feed both galaxies and the central supermassive black hole, whose mass is comparable to one billion suns.
The very first black holes, believed to have formed from the collapse of the first stars, had to grow very rapidly to reach the mass of a billion Suns in 0.9 billion years of the universe's life. The structure found allows us to explain where the material for the emergence of supermassive black holes came from. The web contains enough gas to provide the required mass.
Astronomers believe that the structure itself was formed as a result of the influence of giant halos of dark matter, which in the early universe attracted huge amounts of gas.
