by Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an “extremely red” supermassive black hole growing in the early shadow universe.
The red hue of the supermassive black hole, seen as it was about 700 million years after the Big Bang, is a result of the expanding universe. As the universe balloons out in all directions, the light traveling towards us is “reshifted”, and the reshifted light in this case reflects a blanket of thick gas and dust covering the black hole.
Examining the JWST data, the astronomy team led by Lukas Furtak and Adi Zitrin from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was also able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole. At about 40 million times the mass of the Sun, it is unexpectedly massive compared to the galaxy it inhabits.
The team also discovered that the supermassive black hole, located about 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth, is rapidly consuming the gas and dust around it. In other words, it is growing.
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“We were very happy when JWST started sending its first data. We were scanning the data that came for the UNCOVER program, and three very compact but red-blossom objects stood out prominently and caught our eyes,” said Furtak in a statement. “They immediately appeared ‘red’ and we suspected it was like a quasar object.”
The ‘three red dots’
A quasar is formed when a mass of material surrounds a supermassive black hole like this one. This material forms a disk of gas and dust called an accretion disk that gradually feeds the black hole. The massive gravitational pull of the black hole propels this matter forward, creating intense temperatures and burning.
In addition, material that does not enter the supermassive black hole is sent to the titan’s cosmic poles. Particles in these regions are accelerated to speeds approaching light as high impact jets. As these relativistic jets explode, the eruptions are accompanied by bright electromagnetic emissions.
As a result of these phenomena, quasars are often powered by supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) so bright that the light they emit equals the combined light of all the stars in the galaxy around them.
Because of the enormous amount of radiation being emitted around this particular supermassive black hole, it took on the appearance of small dots in the JWST data.
“An analysis of the colors of the object showed that it was not a normal star-forming galaxy. This supported the supermassive black hole hypothesis,” said Rachel Bezanson, from the University of Pittsburgh and co-leader of the UNCOVER program, in the statement. “Together with its compact size, it was clear that this was probably a supermassive black hole, although it was still different from other quasars found at those early times.”
The early quasar wouldn’t even be visible to 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 there are warped objects at the base of space and time, which are truly unified as a single entity called “space-time.” The theory follows that gravity arises as a result of that curve. The greater the mass of an object, the more “extreme” the curvature of space-time.
This curvature therefore not only tells the planets how to move around the stars and stars and how to move around the center of their home galaxies, but it also changes the paths of light coming from those stars.
The closer to an object of mass that light travels, the more its path is “bent.” Thus different paths of light from a single background object can be bent by a foreground, or “lens object,” and the appearance of the background object’s position can be changed. Sometimes, the effect can even cause the background object to appear in different places in the same image of the sky. Other times, light from the background object is simply amplified, making that object larger.
This phenomenon is called “gravitational lensing”.
In this case, the JWST used a galaxy cluster called Abell 2744 as a foreground lensing body to magnify light from background galaxies, which are otherwise too distant to see. This revealed the extremely red quasar they zeroed in on, initially in the form of three red dots.
“We used a numerical lensing model we had built for the galaxy cluster to determine that the three red dots must be multiple images of the same background source, visible when the universe was only about 700 million years old age,” Zitrin said.
Further analysis of the background source revealed that its light must have come from a dense region.
“All that galaxy light has to fit within a tiny region about the size of a present-day star cluster. Gravitational lensing of the source gave us exquisite limits on the size,” Princeton University team member and researcher Jenny Greene said in the statement. . “Even packing all the possible stars into such a small region, the black hole is at least 1% of the total mass of the system.”
The discovery adds to the mystery of how supermassive black holes, which can be millions (or even billions) the size of the sun, grew so large over the course of the universe.
“Several other supermassive black holes in the early Universe have now been found to exhibit similar behavior, leading to some interesting views of the black hole and host galaxy growth, and the interaction between them, which are not well understood,” said Greene.
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The JWST has discovered a wealth of “little red dots” over time. These could also indicate that a massive black hole powered quasar will soon be able to feed the universe, perhaps the area of growth of a collapsing black hole could soon be resolved.
“In a way, it’s the chicken-and-egg problem in astrophysics,” Zitrin said. “We don’t currently know which came first – the galaxy or the black hole, how massive the first black holes were, and how they grew.”
The team’s research was published on February 14 in the journal Nature.
