The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered the oldest black hole ever seen, an ancient monster with the mass of 1.6 million suns lurking 13 billion years in the universe’s past.
the James Webb Space Telescopewhose cameras enabled him to travel back in time to the beginnings of the universe, observed the supermassive black hole at the center of the emerging galaxy GN-z11 only 440 million years after the beginning of the universe.
The space-time rupture is not alone, but rather one of countless ruptures black holes Which devoured itself to terrifying levels during the cosmic dawn – a period that followed about 100 million years ago the great explosion When the young universe began to glow for a billion years.
It is not clear how cosmic vortices inflated in size so quickly after the beginning of the universe. But the search for an answer could help explain how the supermassive black holes that exist today — which anchor entire galaxies including the Milky Way — grow to such astonishing sizes. The researchers published their findings earlier this year in a preprint database arXivbut the research has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Black holes in the early universe “could not grow quietly and gently as many black holes in the universe do [present-day] Universe,” lead author Roberto Maiolino“They must experience some strange birth or formation, some strange growth,” the University of Cambridge astrophysics professor told Live Science.
Closer to the present day, astronomers believe that black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars. But however they form, they grow by constantly devouring gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As they feed, friction causes the material spiraling inside the black holes’ jaws to heat up, emitting light that can be detected by telescopes – turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGNs).
Related: The object that is mistaken for a galaxy is actually a black hole pointed directly at Earth
The most extreme AGNs are quasars, supermassive black holes billions of times heavier than the Sun, which fire off their gaseous cocoons in bursts of light trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars.
Because light travels at a constant speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper scientists look into the universe, the more distant light they intercept and the greater the distance they intercept. Further back in time They see. To discover the black hole in the new study, astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras — the James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) and the near-infrared camera — and used spectrometers built into the cameras to analyze the light. Into it. Component frequencies
By dissecting these faint flashes from the universe’s early years, they found an unexpected spike between frequencies found within the light, a key sign that the hot matter surrounding the black hole was beaming faint trails of light across the universe.
The most common explanations for how these early black holes grew so quickly are that they formed from the sudden collapse of giant gas clouds or that they came from numerous mergers between star clumps and black holes.
However, astronomers have not ruled out that some of these black holes may have been seeded by supposed “primordial” black holes, believed to have been created moments after – and in some theories even before – the beginning of the universe.
“It’s not that clear [direct collapse] “It’s the only way to form a black hole, because you need some special conditions for that to happen,” Maiolino said. “You need it to be a pure cloud, and yet it needs to be enriched with the heavy elements made by the first stars, and one.” “This is quite huge – from 10,000 to up to a million solar masses.”
To prevent such a cloud from cooling too quickly and collapsing into massive stars first, it would also have to be irradiated with ultraviolet light, most likely from a nearby galaxy or black hole.
“So you need this weird case where the cloud is not enriched [by absorbing exploded star material]”But it’s also next to another galaxy that produces a lot of photons. So we’re not necessarily looking for one scenario, in fact there could be two or more of them,” Maiolino said.
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