The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, an ancient monster with the mass of 1.6 million suns that has been lurking in the universe for the past 13 billion years.
of james webb space telescopeResearchers using the camera to travel back to the beginning of the universe have discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of the infant galaxy GN-z11, just 440 million years after the universe began.
And the space-time rupture is not a single rupture, but one of countless ruptures. Black Hole At the dawn of the universe, about 100 million years into the universe, it reached a terrifying scale. big bang When the young universe began to shine for a billion years.
It’s not clear how the cosmic vortex grew in size so quickly after the universe began. But the search for answers may help explain how today’s supermassive black holes, which support entire galaxies, including the Milky Way, grew to such staggering sizes.The researchers published their findings in a preprint database earlier this year. arXivbut this study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Black holes in the early universe “cannot grow quietly and gently like local black holes.” [present-day] Lead author of “Universe” Roberto MaiorinoProfessor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge told Live Science. “They must undergo some kind of special birth, formation, and special growth.”
In modern times, astronomers believe that black holes are born from the collapse of massive stars. But whatever they become, they grow by constantly eating gas, dust, stars, and other black holes. As the black hole eats, friction heats the material that spirals into the black hole’s mouth, emitting light that can be detected with telescopes and turning it into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGNs).
Related: A celestial object mistaken for a galaxy is actually a black hole pointing directly at Earth
The most extreme AGNs are quasars, supermassive black holes that emit gaseous cocoons in bursts of light billions of times more massive than the Sun and trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars.
Light travels at a constant speed through the vacuum of space, so the deeper scientists probe into space, the more distant light is blocked. further back they see. To discover black holes in the new study, astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras (JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Camera) and used the cameras’ built-in spectrometers to split the light. component frequency.
By resolving these faint glimmers in the early universe, they discovered unexpected spikes in the frequencies contained in the light. This is an important sign that the hot material around the black hole is emitting faint traces of light throughout the universe.
The most common explanations for how these early black holes grew so quickly are that they formed from the sudden collapse of a giant gas cloud, or that they were formed from the mass of stars between a clump of stars and a black hole. It is said to have arisen from a merger.
Nevertheless, astronomers believe that some of these black holes are hypothetical “primordial” black holes that are thought to have been created shortly after the universe began, and in some theories even earlier. He hasn’t ruled out the possibility that he was seeded by Hall.
“It’s not that clear [direct collapse] “The only way to create a black hole is because you need special circumstances for it to happen,” Maiorino said. It’s pretty huge, equivalent to 10,000 to up to 1 million solar masses. ”
To prevent such clouds from cooling too quickly and collapsing into large stars first, they would need to be bombarded with ultraviolet light, perhaps from nearby galaxies or black holes.
“So we have this weird condition where the cloud is not hardened.” [by absorbing exploded star material]“But it’s also next to another galaxy that’s producing a lot of photons,” Maiorino said, adding, “So we’re not necessarily looking for a single scenario, we’re actually looking at those It’s possible that two or more of them are involved.”