JPL: WISE Discovers Most Luminous Galaxy in Universe

[bystander]

WISE Discovers Most Luminous Galaxy in Universe
NASA | JPL-Caltech | WISE | 2015 May 21

This artist's concept depicts the current record holder for the most luminous galaxy in the universe. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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A remote galaxy shining with the light of more than 300 trillion suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The galaxy is the most luminous galaxy found to date and belongs to a new class of objects recently discovered by WISE -- extremely luminous infrared galaxies, or ELIRGs. ...

The brilliant galaxy, known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a behemoth black hole at its belly, gorging itself on gas. Supermassive black holes draw gas and matter into a disk around them, heating the disk to roaring temperatures of millions of degrees and blasting out high-energy, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray light. The light is blocked by surrounding cocoons of dust. As the dust heats up, it radiates infrared light.

Immense black holes are common at the cores of galaxies, but finding one this big so "far back" in the cosmos is rare. Because light from the galaxy hosting the black hole has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us, astronomers are seeing the object as it was in the distant past. The black hole was already billions of times the mass of our sun when our universe was only a tenth of its present age of 13.8 billion years.

The new study outlines three reasons why the black holes in the ELIRGs could have grown so massive. First, they may have been born big. In other words, the "seeds," or embryonic black holes, might be bigger than thought possible. ...

The Most Luminous Galaxies Discovered by WISE - Chao-Wei Tsai et al

• Astrophysical Journal 805(2) 90 (2015 Jun 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/805/2/90
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1410.1751 > 07 Oct 2014 (v1), 08 Apr 2015 (v2)

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

If anything like a white hole existed in the early universe, an object like this conceivably should have been considered. Could something that bright possibly have been one? (really thick sunglasses)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole

[luxorion]

A new rendering of this strange AGN


More renderings on my web.

Thierry
Luxorion
http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/alien ... erings.htm

[saturno2]

Very very interesting
.

[Ann]

If anything like a white hole existed in the early universe, an object like this conceivably should have been considered. Could something that bright possibly have been one? (really thick sunglasses)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole

I used to have a book whose author argued that white holes "should" exist. Since black holes do exist, why shouldn't white holes be out there, too? And if black holes swallow everything that comes sufficiently close and crush them into nothingness in their dimensionless interiors, why shouldn't there be white holes that make these objects whole again and spit them out "on the other side"?

But to me this sounds like so much wishful thinking. Bear in mind that that the accretion disks of black holes can grow tremendously bright. We don't need white holes to explain the luminosity of galaxies and galactic nuclei.

The particular galaxy in question, WISE J224607.57-052635.0, is undergoing a raging wildfire storm of incredible star formation. The light from WISE J224607.57-052635.0 was emitted 12.5 billion years ago, and we can't expect anything similar in the nearby universe. That's because today most gas has already been used up and turned into stars inside galaxies, or else it as been expelled by tremendous jets from supergiant elliptical galaxies, so that it forms a thin hot "soup" surrounding clusters of galaxies, where it is useless for star formation. For us a galaxy like WISE J224607.57-052635.0 is mysterious, but for its time it was probably "merely" remarkable. But if the Milky Way had contained as much gas as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, and if it had been jostled by the small and crowded universe that existed 12.5 billion years ago, our own galactic home might have been at least moderately comparable in brightness to the ultraluminous monster.

And uninhabitable, I would think.

Ann

[neufer]

<<The new study outlines three reasons why the black holes in the ELIRGs could have grown so massive. First, they may have been born big. In other words, the "seeds," or embryonic black holes, might be bigger than thought possible. The other two explanations involve either breaking or bending the theoretical limit of black hole feeding, called the Eddington limit. When a black hole feeds, gas falls in and heats up, blasting out light.>>

• 'Some are born big,'--
  
  'Some achieve bigness,'--
  
  'And some have bigness thrust upon them.'

[Chris Peterson]

• 'Some are born big,'--
  
  'Some achieve bigness,'--
  
  'And some have bigness thrust upon them.'

They are embiggened.

[dllamas]

Interesting