Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered an “extremely red” supermassive black hole growing in the shadow of the early universe.
The red color of the supermassive black hole seen about 700 million years after the Big Bang is a result of the expansion of the universe. As the universe expands in all directions, the light coming toward us becomes “redshifted,” indicating a thick blanket of gas and dust covering the black hole.
The astronomy team, led by Lukas Furtak and Adi Zitrin from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, also managed to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole by examining JWST data. At approximately 40 million times the mass of the Sun, this star is unexpectedly large compared to the galaxy it resides in.
The team also found that the supermassive black hole, located about 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, is rapidly feasting on the gas and dust around it. In other words, it’s growing.
Relating to: Brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole eating ‘one sun a day’
“We were very excited when JWST started sending out its first data. We were scanning incoming data for the UNCOVER program and three very compact but red blooming objects stood out prominently and caught our eye,” Furtak said in a statement. said. “Their ‘red dot’ appearance immediately led us to suspect that it was a quasar-like object.”
‘Three red dots’
Quasars form when supermassive black holes like this one are surrounded by abundant material. This material forms a disk of gas and dust, called an accretion disk, that gradually feeds the black hole. The immense gravitational pull of the black hole churns this matter, generating intense temperatures and causing it to glow.
Additionally, matter that does not fall into the supermassive black hole is directed to the poles of the cosmic giant. Particles in these regions are accelerated as highly collimated jets to speeds approaching the speed of light. As these relativistic jets are ejected, the explosions are accompanied by bright electromagnetic emissions.
As a result of this phenomenon, quasars powered by supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are often so bright that the light they emit often dwarfs the total light of every star in the galaxy surrounding them.
The large amount of radiation emitted from the surroundings of this particular supermassive black hole caused it to take on a small dot-like appearance in the JWST data.
“Analysis of the object’s colors showed that it is not a typical star-forming galaxy. This further supported the supermassive black hole hypothesis,” Rachel Bezanson, one of the co-chairs of the UNCOVER program from the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement. she said. “With its compact size, it appeared that this was likely a supermassive black hole, but it was still different from other quasars found in those early times.”
Without a little help from the effect predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915, the first quasar would not have been visible even with JWST’s powerful infrared eye.
Einstein’s lens
Einstein’s theory of general relativity proposes that massive objects distort the fabric of space and time, and that they actually merge into a single entity called “spacetime.” The theory goes that gravity arises as a result of this curvature. The greater the mass of an object, the more “extreme” the curvature of spacetime.
So not only does this curvature tell planets how to move around stars and the centers of their own galaxies, it also changes the paths of light coming from those stars.
The closer the light is to the massive object, the more its path is “bent”. Different light paths from a single background object can be bent by a foreground or “lens object” and change the appearance of the background object’s location. Sometimes the effect can even cause the background object to appear in more than one place in the same sky image. Other times, the light from the background object is simply amplified and that object is magnified.
This phenomenon is called “gravitational lensing”.
In this case, JWST used a galaxy cluster called Abell 2744 as a foreground lens body to amplify light from background galaxies that were normally too far away to see. This revealed that the extremely red quasar they focused on was originally in the form of three red dots.
“Using the digital lensing model we created for the galaxy cluster, we determined that the three red dots must be multiple images of the same background source, seen when the universe was only 700 million years old,” Zitrin said.
Further analysis of the background source revealed that its light must have come from a compact region.
“All of this galaxy’s light must fit into a small region about the size of a modern-day star cluster. Magnifying the source with a gravitational lens gave us excellent limits on size,” said team member and Princeton University researcher Jenny Greene. expression. “Even if we fit all the possible stars into such a small region, the black hole would still be at least 1% of the total mass of the system.”
The discovery further increases the mystery of how supermassive black holes, which can be millions (or even billions) times the size of the Sun, reached such huge sizes in the early universe.
“Many other supermassive black holes in the early universe have been found to show similar behavior, leading to some intriguing insights into the growth of the black hole and its host galaxy and the interaction between them, which is not well understood,” Greene said. said. .
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JWST detected numerous “little red dots” over time. They may also indicate that supermassive black hole-powered quasars were fueled in the early universe; This could mean that the striking riddle of black hole growth could soon be solved.
“In a way, this is the astrophysical equivalent of the chicken and egg problem,” Zitrin concluded. “We don’t know right now 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 Feb. 14 in the journal Nature.