Everyday Telescope: Black holes have been merging for a very long time

Zoom in / Scientists have determined that this system is evidence of the ongoing merger between two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was only 740 million years old.

ESA/WEP, NASA, CSA and others. the

Welcome to Daily Telescope. There is too little darkness in this world and not enough light, too little pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let the other posts provide your daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe full of stars and wonders.

Good morning. It’s May 21, and today’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope. It shows the meeting of two massive black holes at the beginning of the universe, just 740 million years after the Big Bang.

The mass of each black hole is estimated to be about 50 million times the mass of our star, the Sun. The discovery of this merger so early in the universe indicates that the growth of these objects in the centers of galaxies occurred very quickly.

Fortunately, Webb and his near-infrared spectrometer are well placed to observe the dense, fast-moving gas characteristic of matter accreting into black holes. When they engulf nearby matter, black holes produce highly ionized gas.

“Our findings suggest that merger is an important pathway through which black holes can grow rapidly, even at cosmic dawn.” He said Hannah Opler from the University of Cambridge. “Together with Webb’s other discoveries about active, massive black holes in the distant universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the beginning.”

source: ESA/WEP, NASA, CSA, et al. the

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