The mysteries of a very ancient and massive black hole are being unraveled using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
This supermassive black hole, found in the center of a galaxy named J1120+0641, was already one billion times as massive as our sun when the universe was only 770 million years old, according to anew paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.
This galaxy was discovered in 2011, but exactly how this black hole reached such a gargantuan mass in the infancy of the universe has mystified scientists ever since.
The universe is thought to have begun as an extremely hot and dense point—called a singularity—around 13.8 billion years ago. Eventually, after expanding and cooling for hundreds of thousands of years, gravity pulled together matter to form galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and large-scale structures.
In the center of many galaxies live supermassive black holes, which are giant black holes with masses up to billions of times that of our sun: the one at the center of our Milky Way, named Sagittarius A*, has a mass of about 4 million solar masses. As matter falls into a black hole, it grows larger and larger, and collisions of galaxies can lead to the formation of even larger supermassive black holes through the merger of their central black hole. However, their growth is limited by the radiation they emit as they gobble up matter: if the black hole accretes too rapidly, the radiation pressure can push material away, limiting further growth.
These hungry supermassive black holes can power quasars, which are among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, by eating up enough gas and dust to become active galactic nuclei.
J1120+0641 has a quasar at its center, but astrophysicists are unclear how such a powerful and massive supermassive black hole existed in the first billion years of the universe's existence.
"J1120+0641's accretion structures must have assembled very quickly, as they appear fully 'mature' less than 760 Myr after the Big Bang," the researchers wrote in the paper.
Several explanations have been put forward by scientists over the years to explain how ancient black holes became so large, including theories that these early black holes were more efficient feeders than modern black holes, or that their masses have been overestimated by scientists due to the presence of dust. This new paper discounts one of the major theories put forward to explain these large ancient black holes using data collected by the JWST.
The JWST observations found that the large rotating donut-shaped cloud of dust surrounding the supermassive black hole is much the same as seen in other modern supermassive black holes. This implies that the feeding mechanism of the ancient black hole is the same as those today, meaning that the size of supermassive black holes at the universe's birth cannot be explained by them feeding more efficiently.
Additionally, they found that there was no additional dust surrounding the ancient black hole that could be leading to an overestimation of its mass.
The researchers did discover that the dust surrounding the ancient black hole was slightly warmer than the dust around modern quasars, however.
"Overall, the new observations only add to the mystery: Early quasars were shockingly normal. No matter in which wavelengths we observe them, quasars are nearly identical at all epochs of the Universe," paper co-author Sarah Bosman, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and member of the MIRI European consortium, said in a statement.
Therefore, this cosmic conundrum remains unsolved—for now.
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