An artist’s impression of a black hole and its host galaxy in the early universe. (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva)
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The latest discovery of two black holes in two ancient galaxies has presented astrophysicists with a chicken-and-egg conundrum.
James of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Webb Space Telescope (JWST), captured an image of two galaxies each hosting an actively growing black hole less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Launched in 2021, the Webb Telescope is NASA’s space telescope for infrared spectroscopic astronomy research. It is the largest optical telescope in space, capable of capturing images of extremely old, distant objects, helping to solve puzzles that the Hubble Space Telescope, launched into low-Earth orbit in 1990, could not.
Black holes are bright in the image, but galaxies are hard to see. Before the Webb telescope became operational, researchers found it difficult to make such discoveries.
The Hubble Space Telescope can detect galaxies that are about 3 billion years old, but not younger ones.
The results of the study published in the journal Nature recently showed that the mass of the host galaxy of these two black holes is 130 to 340 billion times that of the sun, and the masses of the two black holes are 1.4 billion and 200 million times the mass of the sun, respectively. times.
Researchers don’t know how the two black holes became so massive just a billion years after the universe was born. A billion years is not a very long time for the history of the universe. While scientists don’t know the exact age of the universe, it’s estimated to be about 13 billion years old.
The unprecedented discovery raised more questions than answers for the research team, which consists of international researchers from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan.
The researchers found that these black holes in the early universe had a similar size ratio to their host galaxies as other black holes in the later universe. This shows that the connection between the black hole and its host galaxy was established some 860 million years after the Big Bang, the study said.
One of the main questions raised by the research is: did the black hole or the host galaxy come first in the universe? And this question is no different from “which came first, the chicken or the egg”. ◇
