Using not one but two of NASA’s powerful space telescopes, astronomers have discovered black holes far enough away to reveal how some of the first supermassive black holes formed. did.
According to NASA, researchers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope to determine what the universe looked like 470 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 3% of its current age. They searched for signs of black hole growth. .
Research using NASA telescopes led by Akos Bogdan and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics natural astronomy on monday.
A black hole was discovered in the galaxy UHZ1. NASA said the star is difficult to discover because it is hidden in a galaxy cluster about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. But Webb’s data revealed that UHZ1’s young black hole is much farther away, 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.
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The astronomy research team followed up on the Webb data with Chandra and discovered superheated gas that emitted X-rays. Astronomers claim this is a trademark of a developing supermassive black hole.
Mysteries surrounding how black holes form and grow rapidly
This discovery is interesting for black hole research because there are still many unknowns about these mysteries of the universe. Astronomers believe that black holes formed within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, but we still don’t know how galaxies begin to form and reach massive masses shortly after the Big Bang.
“There are physical limits to how quickly black holes can grow once they form, but larger black holes have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling. “It takes less time to grow than a seedling. We started with just a seed,” said study co-author Andy Golding of Princeton University.
Astronomers use the Sun’s mass as a measure of a black hole. The mass of a black hole is usually called the “solar mass.” One solar mass is defined as the mass of our Sun.
Using data from Chandra and Webb, the study authors found strong evidence that the newly discovered black hole began life as a giant, estimated to contain between 10 million and 100 million suns. It has said.
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The discovery is consistent with a theory published by Yale University astronomer Priyamvada Natarajan in 2017 about “supermassive black holes” formed by the collapse of giant gas clouds.
“We believe this is the first detection of a ‘supermassive black hole’ and the best evidence yet that some black holes form from giant gas clouds,” Natarajan said. he said in a statement. “For the first time, we are witnessing a brief phase in which a supermassive black hole reaches a mass almost as heavy as a star in our galaxy.”
This won’t be the last collaboration to use JWST against black holes. The research team plans to use more data from Webb and other telescopes to further investigate the early universe, including supermassive black hole galaxies.