Galaxies formed about half of their stellar mass during cosmic noon. At that time, large quantities of gas flowed from the intergalactic medium into galaxies. It corresponds to redshift z=2 to z=3, or when the Universe was about 2 to 3 billion years old. Astronomers think that half of all stars were born during the period. 2023.Ĭosmic Noon is an important time period in the history of the Universe. Red and yellow lines show the trajectories of BH2 and BH3. BH1 is the most massive of the three quasars, and it sits in the center in the bottom row of images. This figure from the research is an illustration of the quasar triplet system and its environment (host galaxies). “What we found are three ultra-massive black holes that assembled their mass during the cosmic noon, the time 11 billion years ago when star formation, active galactic nuclei (AGN), and supermassive black holes, in general, reach their peak activity,” Ni said. The team’s work with Astrid delivered an answer. But UMBHs are even more massive and much rarer. It’s a pure Frontera-based simulation,” she explained.Īstronomers know that galaxies grow large through mergers, and it’s likely that SMBHs grow more massive at the same time. “Frontera is the only system that we performed Astrid from day one.
Luckily, UT Austin has the most powerful academic supercomputer in the USA. (Ni is a co-developer of Astrid.) A powerful tool like Astrid needs a powerful supercomputer. “The science goal of Astrid is to study galaxy formation, the coalescence of supermassive black holes, and re-ionization over the cosmic history,” said lead author Ni in a press release.
BLACK HOLE QUASAR SERIES
The series of zoomed-in panels begins with a massive halo, then stars centred on an SMBH, then the morphology of individual simulated galaxies.
This figure shows some of Astrid’s output. Simulations like Astrid are ranked by the number of particles their simulations contain, and Astrid is at the top of that list. Astrid’s large-scale simulations can track things like dark matter, temperature, metallicity, and neutral hydrogen.
BLACK HOLE QUASAR SIMULATOR
It’s a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulator that runs on the Frontera supercomputer at the University of Texas, Austin. Creating them in scientific simulations requires a massive, complex simulation. “We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,'” said Ni. The lead author is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian. Their paper is “ Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z = 2,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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