WASHINGTON – At the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole about four million times the mass of the Sun, known as Sagittarius A*.
In fact, these objects, whose mass increases over time by consuming objects that move too close, are at the heart of most galaxies.
But since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope began operating in 2022, astronomers have been surprised to discover supermassive black holes that inhabited the early universe – earlier than they thought. with the time it would take to collect that amount.
New observations of one such black hole offer insight into how this could have happened – through a program of extremely rapid growth.
Black holes are very dense objects with such strong gravity that even light cannot escape. Due to its massive gravity, its mass increases by engulfing material such as gas, dust and stars unfortunate enough to be close to it.
“The existence of supermassive black holes in the early universe challenges our current models of black hole formation and growth,” said astronomer Hyewon Suh of the Gemini International Observatory in Hawaii and NOIRLab from the US National Science Foundation, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Webb’s new observations include a supermassive black hole called LID-568 that existed when the cosmos was about 11% of its current age – about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event. Bang 13.8 billion years ago the universe began. LID-568 has a mass about 10 million times that of the Sun, and thus 2-1/2 times that of Sagittarius A*.
Researchers have not yet determined the size of the galaxy it came from.
LID-568 was increasing at a faster rate than previously expected. Webb showed, based on the observed energy results, that LID-568 is likely to consume accretion material – known as accretion – at more than 40 times higher than expected, known as the Eddington limit , for such activity.
“The Eddington limit is a theoretical limit for the maximum energy output that a black hole can produce during the accretion process. Astronomer and study co-author Julia Scharwächter of the Gemini Observatory and NOIRLab.
These primordial black holes are thought to have originated in one of two ways, either after the sudden death of the first generation of stars in the universe or through the collapse of large gas clouds that existed in the early universe.
“The discovery of LID-568 suggests that most of the massive growth may have occurred in a single, rapid accretion episode. This may help explain how supermassive black holes formed so early in the universe , regardless of where they came from,” Suh said.
“Until now, we haven’t found any theoretical proof of how these black holes could have grown so quickly in the early universe,” Suh said.
The main signature of an expanding supermassive black hole is the emission of X-rays, high-energy electromagnetic radiation with a very short wavelength.
The material that orbits a supermassive black hole before being consumed becomes very hot and glows strongly in X-ray waves. Researchers first discovered LID-568 using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and then studied it in more detail using Webb’s infrared observing capabilities.
Webb’s observations suggest that there is some kind of mechanism that allows black holes to consume matter at a faster rate than previously thought.
“LID-568 is remarkable because of how high its growth rate was and because it existed so early in the universe,” Suh said, “We still don’t know how LID-568 was able to cross on the Eddington boundary. To investigate further, we need more data, so we plan to make follow-up observations with Webb.”
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2024-11-09 20:03:00
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