Black Holes and Galaxies Grew Up Together in Early Universe

"There are at least 30 million supermassive black holes in the early universe.”

- NASA Chandra X-ray Center

“We know from observations of nearby galaxies, starting with our own Milky Way - but also extending to other galaxies in the nearby universe - we can actually deduce the presence of their local black holes and find that every galaxy probably does have a black hole at its center.”

- Mitchell Begelman, Ph.D., Dir., JILA; Prof. of Astrophysics, CU-Boulder

Composite image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) combines the deepest X-ray, optical and infrared views of the sky. The composite image shows a small section of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS), where the Chandra sources are blue, the optical HST data are shown in green and blue, and the infrared data from Hubble are in red and green. Using these images, astronomers have obtained the first direct evidence that black holes are common in the early universe and that very young black holes grew more aggressively than thought along side evolving galaxies. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Hawaii/E.Treister et al; Infrared: NASA/STScI/UC Santa Cruz/G.Illingworth et al; Optical: NASA/STScI/S.Beckwith et al.

June 29, 2011 Boulder, Colorado - On June 15, 2011, NASA hosted a TV press conference with several astrophysicists, including Prof. Mitchell Begelman, Ph.D., Director of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) and Prof. of Astrophysics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. The news headline was “NASA's Chandra Finds Massive Black Holes Common in Early Universe.” The next day in the June 16, 2011, issue of Nature, astronomers described “Black Hole Growth in the Early Universe Is Self-Regulated and Largely Hidden from View.”

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