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Giant Glowing Blobs Yield Clues to Galaxy Formation

from ScienceNOW Daily News

A decade ago, astronomers surveying the distant universe discovered giant blobs of shining hydrogen gas bigger than anything ever seen in the cosmos. Since then, researchers have wondered what makes these structures--known as Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs)--glow.

Now, a team of astronomers claims to have found evidence that the blobs are illuminated by radiation and heat from supermassive black holes at their center. The finding supports an emerging idea of how a growing black hole ultimately limits a galaxy's size.

Researchers led by James Geach, an astronomer at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, used NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory to look at 29 blobs in a patch of sky known as SSA 22. A few hundred thousand light-years across in size, the blobs date back to when the universe was less than a sixth of its current age, or about 2 billion years old.