Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2021

40 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The cos- mic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” explains Mignoli. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas — available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole — can flow along the filaments.” The light from this large web-like structure, with its black hole of one billion solar masses, has travelled to us from a time when the Universe was only 0.9 billion years old. “Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of such extreme, yet relatively abun- dant, objects so quickly after the Big Bang,” says co-author Roberto Gilli, also an astronomer at INAF in Bolo- gna, referring to supermassive black holes. The very first black holes, VLT spots galaxies trapped in the web of a SMBH W ith the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), as- tronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the cen- tre of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which con- tain plenty of gas to fuel them. “This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects — supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are ex- treme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new re- search published in Astronomy & As- trophysics . The new observations with ESO’s VLT revealed several galaxies sur- rounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic “spider’s web” by ESO