A black hole has been discovered lurking at the dawn of the universe, but its size defies easy explanation. Located at the center of a galaxy called J1120+0641, it has a mass well over a billion times that of the Sun.
Larger black holes exist all around us today. The problem is when Evidence for the existence of J1120+0641. It is unclear how a black hole could have gained so much mass less than 770 million years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy and its black hole have been known about for over a decade, and scientists have wondered how it came into being. J.W.S.T. They’ve ruled out one of those ideas: Judging by all measurements, J1120+0641 appears to be “surprisingly normal,” leaving more outlandish explanations for the black hole’s growing mass to be explored.
The discovery of J1120+0641 Published in 2011And for several years it remained the most distant quasar galaxy known. In fact, it was quite a few years. As far as we know, J1120+0641 was an outlier, and one explanation for its size was still under consideration.
Quasar galaxies are galaxies with a supermassive black hole at their center that is sucking in gas and dust at an incredible rate. Quasar galaxies are surrounded by huge clouds of gas and dust, which they are sucking in as fast as they can. Friction and gravity around the black hole heat up the material, making it glow brightly.
However, the speed at which a black hole can absorb matter is not infinite. The maximum stable speed is Eddington limitAbove that, the heated material glows extremely brightly, Radiation pressure exceeds gravityIt pushes matter away so that there’s nothing left for the black hole to eat.
Now, black holes can briefly enter a state of super-Eddington accumulation, exceeding this limit and gobbling up as much matter as they can before radiation pressure kicks in. This is one possible explanation for the black hole at the center of J1120+0641, and for other large black holes (more of which are being discovered) lurking at the beginning of the universe.
To look for signs of super-Eddington accumulators, astronomers needed data with enough resolution to dissect the galaxy’s light, looking for features associated with extreme processes. And to do that they needed JWST, the most powerful space telescope ever made, optimized for peering into distant regions of space and time.
The JWST will observe the galaxy in early 2023, and a team led by astronomer Sarah Bosmann of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany will analyze the light they collect to catalog the properties of the material around the black hole: a massive torus of dust on its fringes and a glowing disk that swirls around and flows into the black hole.
The analysis reveals that the black hole is actually powering itself quite normally, with its accretion not appearing to be significantly different than in other recent quasar galaxies.
One possible reason for these massive black holes is that extra dust has caused astronomers to overestimate their mass, but there’s no sign of any additional dust getting into them.
This means that J1120+0641 is just what it seems: a regular quasar galaxy with a black hole that isn’t gobbling down material at super-high speeds — and that the black hole and its feeding methods were already relatively mature when it was observed, within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.
“Overall, the new observations only deepen the mystery: early quasars were surprisingly ordinary.” Bosman says“No matter what wavelength you observe it at, quasars are pretty much the same at every age in the universe.”
This means that super-Eddington accretion is not the solution to why inexplicably massive black holes grew in the ancient past.
Another popular explanation is that black holes originally formed from much larger “seeds.” Rather than slowly and gradually forming from something the size of a star, this theory proposes that black holes formed from a clump of material, or even from the collapse of a very massive star – hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Sun – and then grew faster.
As we discover more and more of these massive objects lurking in the mists of the universe’s beginning, this concept seems less strange and instead more like the best explanation for this mysterious period in the history of our universe.
This study Natural Astronomy.