(ORDO NEWS) — An object lurking in the hazy dawn of the universe has given astronomers a big surprise.
Observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an active supermassive black hole, 10 million times the mass of the Sun, which is actively growing, absorbing matter from the space around it.
Just 570 million years after the Big Bang, this is the earliest ever discovered growing supermassive black hole, though scientists hope it wins. t remains the record holder for a long time.
A black hole has been found inside one of the earliest galaxies ever discovered, formerly known as EGSY8p7 but later renamed CEERS_1019.
His discovery could help with one of the biggest puzzles in the early universe: how black holes in the Cosmic Dawn grew to such a large size in such a short amount of time.
“We have discovered the most distant active galactic nucleus (ANG) and the most distant and earliest black hole we have ever found,” Larson told.
Larson was originally looking at CEERS_1019 as part of his work to study the light produced by star formation in the very early universe.
This light, called Lyman alpha radiation, is thought to result from the ionization of neutral hydrogen from star formation.
The early universe was filled with a haze of neutral hydrogen that blocked the propagation of light; only after this hydrogen was ionized could light flow freely.
This Age of Reionization is notoriously not fully understood. We know it happened in the first billion years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, but it’s really hard to look that far into the early universe.
CEERS_1019 and several other very early galaxies are excellent targets for this study because they are relatively bright.
The galaxy was identified in the Hubble data in 2015 and at the time was the earliest and most distant observed galaxy.
Subsequent observations confirmed its existence, but more detailed information remained unavailable: the earliest light in the universe was so shifted to the infrared part of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe that a powerful specialized infrared instrument, such as JWST, is needed to study them.
So, when JWST appeared, CEERS_1019 – the brightest of the Hubble galaxies of that era – was an obvious target.
The telescope observed the galaxy for only one hour with all four instruments, but returned a huge amount of data.
The moment I thought, “Wow, look at everything we can see with JWST, we’ve seen this whole part of the spectrum of this galaxy – and any galaxies in the early stages of the Universe – that we’ve never seen before.” Larson reports to ScienceAlert. “I was just overwhelmed by the amount of information.”
But then she noticed something she didn’t expect at all. In addition to star formation light, there was a broad emission feature commonly associated with AGNs. And when she mentioned it to some of the AGN researchers, things got interesting.
Typically, galaxies in the early universe emit either light from AGNs or light from star formation. To see both in the same galaxy was extremely unexpected.
“I was just as surprised as everyone else,” Larson says. “We had a whole argument for weeks about which one should be, should it be one or the other.
And it turns out it’s both. we see, but most of the light we see in our images still comes from the star-forming part of the galaxy.”
That a supermassive black hole existed over 13.2 billion years ago and was seen growing is not as surprising as you might think.
Much larger black holes were found in the early universe; J1342+0928, a quasar galaxy discovered 690 million years after the Big Bang, has a supermassive black hole clocked at 800 million Suns.
The black hole in J0313-1806 670 million years after the Big Bang measured 1.6 billion suns.
Both of these quasars are dominated by AGN radiation. Larson and her colleagues believe that CEERS_1019 appears to represent an intermediate stage: a point between later, larger, AGN-dominated galaxies and how those galaxies and their black holes began to form in the first place.
“We didn’t and still don’t know how the black holes in these galaxies became so massive so early in the universe,” Larson explains.
“So we found what we think could be the progenitor or what grew into these incredibly massive quasars. .”
Looking at the supermassive black hole in CEERS_1019, the researchers believe that the object was formed from the collapse of a massive object, such as one of the first stars in the universe.
These stars were much, much larger than the stars we see today, so a black hole from such a collapse would have an advantage on its way to becoming supermassive.
But it still needs to be increased a little. This could have happened in the form of periodic super-Eddington accretion. The Eddington limit is the maximum sustainable rate at which black holes can grow.
Material swirls around the black hole in the disk, falling into the black hole like water down a sewer. In the Eddington limit, the material moves so fast that instead of going around the black hole, it flies off into space.
Supereddington accretion is only possible for short periods of time; but according to the team’s simulations, it could have been possible in the flares that helped enlarge the black hole at the center of CEERS_1019.
But the best way to learn more about them is to find more intermediate galaxies, and that looks like it could be done. As Larson points out, the results were obtained in just one hour of observation.
Truly deep observations are expected to reveal more distant and even dimmer galaxies, which will finally help us understand how the universe was born and grew.
“I don’t think my record will last long,” Larson says. “And I hope not, because I think it’s more interesting that we start answering these questions.”
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