CNN Indonesia
Tuesday, 11 Apr 2023 16:00 WIB
Illustration. Experts have found the oldest black hole that has a mass 10 times heavier than the Sun. (iStockphoto/Elen11)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
A number of experts managed to detect black hole oldest in the galaxy by harnessing Teleskop James Webb. The space ‘monster’ is said to have a mass 10 times heavier than the Sun.
Reported Live Science, the black hole was discovered at the center of a ‘young’ galaxy 570 years after the Universe was created. The black hole could also be just one of many black holes that are getting bigger during the cosmic dawn.
The Cosmic Dawn is the period that began 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe shone for billions of years.
The discovery of the world’s oldest black hole has been written by experts via ArXiv. However, this research has not gone through a peer review process.
“This is the first found in phase redshift (sometime in the time after the Big Bang), there should still be many of these black holes,” said study leader Rebecca Larson, an astrophysicist from the University of Texas at Austin.
“We really hope that these black holes didn’t just form, recently. As a result, there should have been younger, earlier-existing black holes in the Universe. We’re only just getting started to be able to study this epoch in cosmic history with JWST, ” he added.
Black holes form when massive stars collide and grow by eating gas, dust, stars, and other black holes.
So voracious, the friction in the black hole causes material that is rotating upwards to heat up and emit light that can be detected by telescopes and turns it into a galactic active nucleus (AGN).
The most extreme black holes are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the Sun and emit bursts of light trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars.
Detection way
To detect black holes, astronomers scan the sky with two infrared cameras, namely the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and the Near Infrared Camera. Then, they used the spectrograph in the camera to break the light down into its frequency components.
By reconstructing the faint light originating in the early Universe, they found unexpected spikes between the frequencies contained in the light – a key sign that hot matter around black holes emits faint trails of radiation throughout the universe.
Until now, scientists still don’t know what causes black holes to form and how they grow. However, there are two main theories about how black holes grew so quickly after the Big Bang.
First, black holes are the remnants of massive stars that formed much faster than is currently known. Second, billowing clouds of incredibly dense gas suddenly collapse to form an all-consuming singularity in space-time.
“The direct annihilation method would start with the larger amount of material in the galaxy colliding directly into the black hole,” he said.
“The collapse was less conclusive, but it took a little time and there wasn’t a lot of time available while we were observing it,” Larson added.
He also mentioned Population III Star, which is a star category that is hypothesized to exist for the first time in the universe.
This type of star is made only of hydrogen and helium and then explodes and leaves a black hole about 200 million years after the Big Bang.
“[Bintang ini] it then collects a lot of material quite quickly and sometimes at a faster-than-steady rate,” Larson continued, adding that it then swelled in size to what the researchers are currently observing.
The researchers will now begin working alongside the team that built MIRI to scan for more intense light signatures from distant galaxies. The emission could contain further clues about how mysterious black holes form at the center of galaxies.
(lth)
