How many ways are there to leave this universe?
Perhaps the most well-known exit involves the death of a star. In 1939, University of California, Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Harlan Snyder discovered that when a large enough star runs out of thermonuclear fuel, it collapses inward, shrinking space, time, and space. I predicted that it would continue to wrap and collapse forever. There is light around itself in what today is called a black hole.
But it turns out you may not need a dead star to create a black hole. Instead, at least in the early universe, giant clouds of primordial gas may have collapsed directly into black holes, avoiding the millions of years spent on stardom.
That’s the tentative conclusion recently reached by a group of astronomers studying UHZ-1, a point of light shortly after the Big Bang. In fact, UHZ-1 is (or was) a powerful quasar that spewed fire and X-rays from a massive black hole 13.2 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 500 million years old.
From a cosmic perspective, it is unprecedented for such a huge black hole to be born through the collapse and merger of stars. Priyamvada Natarajan is an astronomer at Yale University and Paper published in Astrophysical Journal Lettersand their colleagues claim to have discovered a new type of object in UHZ-1, which they call a supermassive black hole galaxy (OBG). Essentially, an OBG is a young galaxy pinned down by a black hole that has grown too large too quickly. .
The discovery of this precocious quasar could help solve a related puzzle that has puzzled astronomers for decades. Almost every visible galaxy in the modern universe appears to have a supermassive black hole millions of times the mass of the Sun at its center. Where did those monsters come from? Is it possible for an ordinary black hole to grow so quickly?
Dr. Natarajan and his colleagues argue that UHZ-1, and perhaps many supermassive black holes, began as primordial clouds. These clouds may have prematurely collapsed into heavy cores, enough to start the growth of supermassive black hole galaxies. These are yet another reminder that the universe we see is controlled by an invisible, dark geometry.
“As the first OBG candidate, UHZ-1 provides convincing evidence for the formation of a heavy initial seed by direct collapse of the early universe,” Dr. Natarajan and colleagues write. She added in her email: “Nature seems to be creating seeds for BH in many ways beyond just star death!”
“Priya has discovered a black hole that, if true, is very interesting,” said Daniel Holtz, a theorist at the University of Chicago who studies black holes.
He added: “It’s simply too big, it’s too early. It’s like walking into a kindergarten classroom and seeing 5-year-olds that are either 150 pounds or 6 feet tall or both.”
The story astronomers have told us about the evolution of the universe is that the first stars condensed from clouds of hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. They burned hot and fast, quickly exploding and collapsing into black holes 10 to 100 times the mass of the Sun.
Over many years, successive generations of stars formed from the ashes of previous stars, enriching the chemistry of the universe. And the black holes left behind by their deaths somehow continued to coalesce and grow, becoming the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched two Christmases ago, was designed to test this idea. It features the largest mirror in the universe, measuring 21 feet in diameter. More importantly, it was designed to record infrared wavelengths from the light of the most distant, and therefore earliest, stars in the universe.
But as soon as the new telescope was trained in the sky, it captured a new galaxy that was so massive and bright that it defied cosmologists’ expectations. There has been intense debate in recent years about whether these observations actually threaten long-standing models of the universe. This model explains that the universe is made up of trace amounts of matter that we can see, incredible amounts of “dark matter” that provides the gravitational force that holds galaxies together, and “dark energy” that pulls these galaxies apart.
The discovery of UHZ-1 represents a turning point in these debates. In preparation for future observations of a massive galaxy cluster in the constellation Lacora with the James Webb Space Telescope, Dr. Natarajan’s team sought time to spend time at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The mass of this cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying objects far behind in spacetime. The researchers hoped to get a glimpse in X-rays of what the lens would bring to the field of vision.
What they discovered was a quasar powered by a supermassive black hole about 40 million times more massive than the sun. Further observations with the Webb telescope confirmed that it is 13.2 billion light years away. (The Sculptor Cluster is about 3.5 billion light-years away.) It was the most distant and oldest quasar ever discovered in the Universe.
“We needed Webb to find this amazingly distant galaxy, and we needed Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a news release. Ta. “We also used a space magnifier to increase the amount of light detected.”
This result indicates that supermassive black holes existed 470 million years after the Big Bang. That’s not enough time for black holes created by the first generation of stars, which started at 10 to 100 solar masses, to grow this large.
Was there another way to create a larger black hole? In 2017, Dr. Natarajan suggested that a black hole with a mass more than 10,000 times the mass of the sun could have been created by the collapse of a cloud of primordial gas. did.
“You can imagine one of them then growing into this young, precocious, large black hole,” Holtz said. As a result, “there will always be incredibly large black holes in the history of the universe,” he said.
“The fact that they start out supermassive in life suggests that they are likely to eventually evolve into supermassive black holes,” Natarajan said. But no one knows how it works. Black holes make up 10 percent of the mass of the early quasar UHZ-1, but less than one-thousandth of a percent of the mass of modern galaxies like the giant Messier 87, where the black hole had a mass of 6.5 It consists of When the photo was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019, it amounted to 1 billion solar masses.
This suggests that complex environmental feedback effects govern the growth and evolution of these galaxies and black holes, increasing the mass of stars and gas.
“So these very early OBGs are actually telegraphing and revealing much more information about the physics of the species than about later growth and evolution,” Dr. Natarajan said. Ta. She added: “Though they do have important implications.”
Dr. Holtz said, “It would be great to find out what’s actually going on, but I’m really agnostic.” He added: “No matter how we solve the mystery of early supermassive black holes, it will be an interesting story.”