Australian astronomers Stephen Curran from Sydney University and Matthew whiting from the State Union of scientific and applied research (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO) claim that finally found the cause of the deficit of hydrogen in the early Universe.

As it turned out, supermassive black holes could provide sufficient UV radiation to ionize interstellar hydrogen even before the main mass of the stars. (Illustration : NASA, JPL.)

The lack of hydrogen in the period after the Big Bang began to bother scientists immediately after they tried to relate vnutriserdecnuu environment of the areas that we see what they were 11-12 billion years ago, with their stellar population. And it turned out that the observed there density of hydrogen is simply insufficient to make him present a very large number of stars.

"We investigated ten ancient galaxies and was very surprised that there are no traces of hydrogen, " says Stephen Curran. - Meanwhile they should be more of cold hydrogen than in young galaxies". Indeed, given that it is 11 billion years ago the Universe was the peak of zvezdoobrazovaniya, and the stars are formed from the cold (up to several degrees Kelvin) of hydrogen, the complete absence of at least paradoxical.

Mr. Curran and whiting came upon a solution by chance, studying the radio emission from the region of the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole at the galactic center, remote from us 11 billion light years. Usually ionized hydrogen cannot be seen by the radiation, but the ionization in the described period was hampered by a shortage of fledgling stars, which today are the major source of ultraviolet radiation and ionization of hydrogen.

The galaxies without cold ionized hydrogen together was galaxies, rich radiation with a wavelength of 1 + 216. The researchers concluded that the source of such radiation and cause total ionization of hydrogen were active cores, more precisely, located in the galactic supermassive black holes. Absorbing falling in them matter, it spinning her in the accretion disk, and she began to emit ionizing hydrogen not only in the kernel, but almost in the whole galaxy.

This suggests an interesting conclusion: SMCD early Universe, apparently, is firmly suppressed the formation of stars in the galaxy.

Report on the study published in the Astrophysical Journal, and its Preprint available here.

Based on the materials ABC Science.