by A team of astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover the most distant and oldest black hole ever seen feasting on its host galaxy.
The discovery could be a huge step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes reached masses equal to millions of thousands of times that of the sun in the early universe.
The black hole resides in the ancient galaxy GN-z11, which is 13.4 billion light-years away and therefore appears as if it were only 400 million years after the Big Bang. The black hole itself is about 6 million times the size of the sun and appears to be feeding on material from the surrounding galaxy five times faster than the sustainable limit suggested by current theories.
Cambridge University’s Department of Physics and team leader Roberto Maiolino described the discovery as a “huge breakthrough” for black hole science in a statement.
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“It is very early in the Universe to see a black hole this massive, so we have to think about other ways they could form,” Maiolino said in the statement. “Very early galaxies were very rich in gas, so they would be like a buffet for black holes.”
Are supermassive black holes overeating?
The size of the early supermassive black holes that formed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old is a problem for formation theories because it should take billions of years of steady feeding to reach a mass of millions or billions of times more than the sun.
“It’s like seeing a family walking down the street, and they have two six-foot-tall teenagers, but they also have a six-foot-tall toddler,” said Maynooth University research colleague John Reagan, who was not involved in the research this. Space.com as a reference for previous discoveries. “That’s a problem; how did the kid get so high? And it’s the same for supermassive black holes in the universe. How did they get so fast?”
Scientists currently have two main routes that black holes could take to reach massive status early in the universe. They could start out as small black hole seeds created when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives and after millions or billions of years, or they could skip this stage altogether.
This could happen, perhaps, if large clouds of cold gas and dust immediately collapsed to form a “heavy black hole seed” with a mass several million times that of the sun. That way, the process progresses rapidly through millions or billions of years of stellar evolution, getting a head start on the feeding and merging processes that help black hole seeds grow into supermassive black holes. The discovery of this new ancient black hole with a mass several million times that of the sun is in favor of that heavy seed theory.
But, on the flip side of this, the rate at which the black hole in GN-z11 is accreting matter could suggest that black holes may be able to feed much faster than previously thought. observed in another black hole discovered early in the universe to do so. . This would be a leg up for small black hole seed theories.
A mathematical formula known as the Eddington limit shows how fast a body, such as a star, can accumulate mass without the radiation it emits (its luminosity) pushing that mass out and thus cutting off that food supply .
Although black holes do not emit light because they are confined by a light-trapping boundary called the event horizon, their massive gravitational influence causes the surrounding matter to be violently cooled and heated, emitting radiation in the process. The faster a black hole grows, the more intense the light from that region, known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
Thus, the Eddington limit applies to this region, and it can act similarly to push matter out and cut off the life of a black hole.
This newly discovered black hole is accreting material from its host galaxy at a rate five times higher than the Eddington limit. Periods of so-called “super-Eddington evidence” can only occur in limited positions.
The team estimated that if this period of feeding for this black hole had continued for 100 million years, it might not have started life as a heavy black hole seed. It could have formed from the seed of a much lighter stellar mass black hole between about 250 million and 370 million years after the Big Bang and rapidly grew to its mass as seen by the JWST 13.4 million years ago.
A black hole feeding could destroy its host galaxy
One thing the team is pretty sure of is that the intense feeding of this black hole is responsible for GN-z11 itself, which is about 100 times smaller than the Milky Way and very luminous. But the gluttonous black hole is likely to stunt the growth of its host galaxy.
The very fast winds of particles ejected across the feeding black hole are likely to push away gas and dust from the heart of the galaxy. Cold clouds of gas and dust fall to birth stars, so this means that the black hole is grinding stellar birth to stop, in the process “killing” the growth of the small galaxy.
In addition to learning more about this black hole and its galaxy, the team behind this research believes that the power of the JWST should help to find more black holes in the early universe.
In particular, they aim to find tiny black hole seeds in the early cosmos and put to rest the debate surrounding the premature growth of supermassive black holes.
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“It’s a new era: The huge leap in sensitivity, especially in the infrared, is like upgrading from a Galileo telescope to a modern telescope overnight,” said Maiolino. “Before the JWST came online, I thought that maybe the universe is not so interesting when you go further than we could see with the Hubble Space Telescope. it is showing us, and this is just the beginning.”
The team’s research was published on Wednesday, January 17, in the journal Nature.
