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  Dancing Galaxies Make a Monster at the Cosmic Dawn

  Animation Movie Black Holes Distant Universe

  The Subaru Telescope has discovered a pair of relatively faint quasars 12.8 billion light-years away (900 million years old, the “dawn of the universe”).
  Quasars are objects that shine brightly due to the energy released when a large amount of gas falls into a supermassive black hole.
  Observations of this object with the ALMA telescope revealed that the two mother galaxies hosting each quasar have merged.
  Professor Takuma Izumi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan predicts that this object will fully merge in a few hundred million years and evolve into an intensely bright quasar as more gas flows into the central black hole.
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  Supermassive Black Hole Feeding and Feedback are Finally Resolved at the Center of an Active Galaxy

  Animation Movie Black Holes

  An international research team led by Associate Professor Takuma Izumi (Associate Professor at that time) of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has observed the Circinus Galaxy at extremely high resolution using the ALMA telescope. As a result, the team clearly captured the accretionary flow toward the supermassive black hole and revealed that the accretionary flow is caused by a physical mechanism called “gravitational instability". Furthermore, it was found that most of the accretion flow is not used for the growth of the black hole, but is instead ejected as atomic or molecular gas from the vicinity of the black hole, and then returns to the gas disk to become accretion flow to the black hole again, as if a fountain-like gas cycle is occurring. This is an important achievement for understanding the growth mechanism of supermassive black holes. "more information"
  Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T. Izumi et al.