by Forget the “little green men” – it’s the “little red dots” in the infant universe that caught the eye of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The red dwarf bodies, according to scientists, hide stars that models suggest are “too old” to have survived during the early cosmic times and black holes thousands of times larger than the hole the heart of the Milky Way is a black giant. Scientists believe that these objects must have been born in a way unique to the early universe — by a method that appears to have ended in the cosmos after about 1 billion years of existence.
The three small red dots are seen as they were when the universe was between 600 million and 800 million years old. Although it may seem like an incredibly long time after the Big Bang, the fact that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old means that it was not more than 5% of its current age when these objects existed.
By confirming the existence of these dots in the early universe, these JWST results could challenge what we know about the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their cores.
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The team, led by scientists from Penn State University, spotted these mysterious crimson cosmic wonders while probing the early universe with JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument as part of the RUBIES survey.
“It’s very confusing,” team member Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. “You can fit this uncomfortably into our current model of the universe, unless we stir up an alien, insanely fast formation at the beginning of time.
“This is without a doubt the strangest and most interesting series of objects I have seen in my career.”
What is behind the dots?
The researchers studied the intensity of the different wavelengths of light coming from the small red dots. This showed signs that the stars are hundreds of millions of years old – much older than stars are thought to be at this early stage of the cosmos.
The researchers also saw traces of supermassive black holes within the small red regions with masses equal to millions, sometimes even billions of suns. These black holes are between 100 and 1,000 times as massive as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way that stands only 26,000 light-years from Earth.
Both of these discoveries are not expected under current models of cosmic evolution, galaxy growth, or supermassive black hole formation. All these theories suggest that galaxies grow and become supermassive black holes in a green phase – but this growth takes billions of years.
“We’ve confirmed that these appear to be full of old stars — hundreds of millions of years old — in a universe that just [600 million to 800 million years] Old. Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of ancient light,” research leader Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State, said in the statement. The standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been very successful, but these luminous objects do not fit comfortably into those theories.”
The team first spotted the little red dots while using the JWST back in July. At the time, the researchers immediately suspected that the objects were galaxies from about 13.5 billion years ago.
A deeper investigation of the light spectrum of these objects confirmed that these were galaxies that lived through the dawn of time and also revealed that “overgrown” supermassive black holes and “old” stars were impossibly driving the red dots’ spectacular light output.
The team is not yet sure how much of the light from the little red dots comes from each of these sources. That means these galaxies are either unexpectedly old and more massive than the Milky Way, formed much earlier than models predicted, or have normal masses but somehow supermassive black holes – a vacuum that is much larger than a similar galaxy would have during the year. The present time of the cosmos.
“It is challenging to distinguish between light from matter falling into a black hole and light emitted from stars in these tiny, distant objects,” Wang said. “That inability to tell the difference in the current data set leaves a lot of room for interpretation of these interesting things.”
That’s no ordinary supermassive black hole!
Of course, all black holes have light-trapping boundaries called “event mountains,” which means that whatever light they add to the little red dots must come from the material around them rather than from the side. inside
The massive gravitational influence of black holes creates turbulent conditions in this matter, which feed the black hole over time, heating it up and causing it to glow brightly. Regions powered by supermassive black holes in this way are called “quasars”, and the regions of galaxies in which they are located are called “active galactic nuclei (AGNs).”
These newly discovered “Red dot” black hole regions could be different from other quasars, even those that JWST has already seen in the early universe. For example, red black holes seem to have much more ultraviolet light than expected. Still, the most frightening thing about these supermassive black holes is their size.
“Typically, supermassive black holes are paired with galaxies,” Leja said. “They grow up together and go through all their big life experiences together. But here, we have a fully formed black hole living inside the baby galaxy that should have been there.
“That doesn’t really make sense because these things should grow together, or at least that’s what we thought.”
The red dot galaxies themselves are also surprising. They appear to be much smaller than other galaxies despite having nearly as many stars. That means the red dot galaxies appear to be made up of between 10 billion and 1 trillion stars squeezed into a galaxy a few hundred light-years across with a volume 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.
To put that in context, if the Milky Way were shrunk to the size of one of these red dot galaxies, the closest star to the sun (Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away) would be within the solar system. In addition, the distance between Earth and the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, would be reduced from 26,000 light years to just 26 light years. You could see that and its surroundings visible in the night sky above the Earth.
“These early galaxies would be so close to stars – stars that must have formed in a way that we have never seen, under conditions that we would not expect during a period that we would not expect to see,” said Leja. “And for whatever reason, the universe stopped making things like this after only a few billion years. They’re unique to the early universe.”
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The team plans to follow up their findings with further observations of these puzzling little red dots to better understand the mystery of the dots. This will include obtaining deeper spectra by pointing the JWST at the red objects for long periods of time to obtain light emission spectra associated with different elements. This could help resolve the contribution of ancient stars and supermassive black holes to galaxies.
“There’s another way we could progress, and that’s just it [having] the right idea,” Leja concluded. “We all have these puzzle pieces, and they only fit if we ignore the fact that some of them are breaking. This problem lends itself to an ingenious stroke that has so far eluded us, all our collaborators, and the entire scientific community.
“Honestly, it’s very satisfying to leave so much of this mystery to be figured out.”
The team’s research was published on June 26 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
