After Growth Spurt, Supermassive Black Holes Spend Half Their Lives Veiled in Dust

As massive, gas-rich galaxies in the distant universe collide, the central black hole feeds on gas that is funneled to the center of the merger. “As a result of the violent, messy collision, the black hole also remains obscured behind a ‘veil’ of dust for between 10 million and 100 million years,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy at Yale and one of the paper’s authors. After that time the dust is blown away to reveal a brightly shining quasar—the central region of a galaxy with an extremely energetic, supermassive black hole at its center—that lasts for another 100 million years, the team found...

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