Cosmic history: Part of the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, used to make the discovery.
Credit: Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Photo: Matthew L. Abbondanzio
"We see that some of the most massive black holes in today's galaxies already have formed more than 12 billion years ago," Riechers said, long before the galaxies themselves.
Riechers said that his team will now try to figure out how the black hole and the bulge affect each other's growth and why they come to have the standard 1:1000 mass ratio.
The experts plan to use new telescopes coming online in the next few years, such as the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), which will have the sensitivity and resolving power to see the formation of some of the universe's earliest galaxies.
"A real milestone"
Showing that the ratio of mass of supermassive black holes and the central bulge of galaxies changes over time is the first step in understanding how these galaxies form, commented John Dickey, an astronomer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.
"This is a real milestone," Dickey said. "If this result can be [replicated] by other researchers, it will certainly point to black holes forming first. That's rather different from what many people would have said a few years ago."
