Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an ‘extremely red’ supermassive black hole growing in the shadowy early universe.
The red hue of the supermassive black hole, seen as it appeared about 700 million years after the Big Bang, is the result of the expanding universe. As the universe moves outward in all directions, the light traveling toward us becomes “redshifted,” and the redshifted light in this case indicates a mantle of thick gas and dust surrounding the black hole.
By examining JWST data, the astronomy team led by Lukas Furtak and Adi Zitrin of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was also able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole. With a mass of about 40 million times the mass of the Sun, it is unexpectedly large compared to the galaxy in which it resides.
The team also found that the supermassive black hole, located about 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth, is rapidly feeding on the gas and dust around it. In other words, it’s growing.
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“We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data. We were scanning the data coming in for the UNCOVER program, and three very compact but red blooming objects stood out prominently and caught our attention,” Furtak said in a statement . “Their ‘red dot’ appearance immediately led us to suspect it was a quasar-like object.”
The ‘three red dots’
Quasars form when large amounts of matter surround supermassive black holes like this one. This matter forms a disk of gas and dust, a so-called accretion disk, which gradually feeds the black hole. The black hole’s immense gravitational influence sets this matter in motion, creating intense temperatures and causing it to glow.
Moreover, matter that does not fall into the supermassive black hole is directed to the poles of the cosmic Titan. Particles in these regions are accelerated to speeds approaching that of light as strongly collimated jets. As these relativistic jets are emitted, the bursts are accompanied by bright electromagnetic emissions.
As a result of these phenomena, quasars powered by supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are often so bright that the light they emit is often greater than the combined light of every star in the galaxy surrounding them.
The enormous amount of radiation emitted around this particular supermassive black hole gave it a small point-like appearance in JWST data.
“Analysis of the object’s colors indicated that it was not a typical star-forming galaxy. This further supported the supermassive black hole hypothesis,” Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh and co-lead of the UNCOVER program said in the statement. “Its compact size made it clear that this was likely a supermassive black hole, even though it was still different from other quasars found at those early times.”
The early quasar would not have been visible even to the JWST’s powerful infrared eye without a little help from an effect predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915.
Einstein’s lens
Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that massive objects distort the fabric of space and time, which are truly unified as a single entity called “spacetime.” The theory continues that gravity arises as a result of that curvature. The greater the mass of an object, the more ‘extreme’ the curvature of spacetime is.
This curvature therefore not only tells planets how to move around stars and stars and how to move around the centers of their home systems, but also changes the paths of light coming from those stars.
The closer the light is to the mass object, the more its path is ‘bent’. Thus, different light paths from a single background object can be bent by a foreground or ‘lens’ object, shifting the appearance of the background object’s location. Sometimes the effect can even cause the background object to appear in multiple places in the same image of the sky. Other times the light from the background object is simply amplified and that object is magnified.
This phenomenon is known as ‘gravitational lensing’.
In this case, the JWST used a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744 as a foreground lens body to amplify the light from background galaxies that are otherwise too far away to see. This revealed the extremely red quasar they were targeting, originally in the shape of three red dots.
“We used a numerical lens model we constructed for the cluster of galaxies to determine that the three red dots must be multiple images of the same background source, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old,” Zitrin said.
Further analysis of the background source revealed that the light must be coming from a compact area.
“All the light from that galaxy must fit within a small region the size of a current star cluster. The gravitational lensing magnification of the source gave us excellent limits on its size,” team member and Princeton University researcher Jenny Greene said in the study. rack. “Even if we pack all possible stars into such a small area, the black hole will ultimately account for at least 1% of the total mass of the system.”
The discovery further adds to the mystery of how supermassive black holes, which can be millions (or even billions) times as massive as the Sun, grew to such enormous sizes during the universe’s infancy.
“Several other supermassive black holes in the early universe are now exhibiting similar behavior, leading to some intriguing images of black hole and galaxy growth, and the interactions between them, which are not yet well understood,” Greene said. .
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Over time, the JWST has discovered a wealth of ‘little red dots’. These could also indicate that supermassive black hole-powered quasars were fueled in the early universe, perhaps meaning that a striking black hole growth problem could soon be solved.
“In a sense, this is the astrophysical equivalent of the chicken-and-egg problem,” Zitrin concluded. “We currently don’t know which came first: the galaxy or the black hole, how big the first black holes were and how they grew.”
The team’s research was published on February 14 in the journal Nature.