Artist’s rendering of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez
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The Webb Space Telescope Team keep working to me commissioning This is the last step before the start of scientific operations in the summer. We recently saw an amazing photo of The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxytaken by event horizon telescope. One of the mysteries of modern astronomy is how big each one is galaxy He came to have a giant centrality Black holeand how some of these black holes were huge even in the early universe. We asked Roberto Maiolino, a member of Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) team, to tell us how Webb would help answer some of these questions.
“One of the most exciting areas of discovery that Webb will unlock is the search for primordial black holes in the early universe. It is the seed of the most massive black hole astronomers have found at the galactic core. Most galaxies (perhaps all ) harbor black holes at their centers, and their masses range from millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, these supermassive black holes have grown very large by devouring the surrounding matter and also by merging smaller black holes.
“The most recent exciting discovery is the discovery of a supermassive black hole, with a mass of several billion solar masses, which actually existed when the universe was only about 700 million years old, a fraction of its current age of 13.8 billion years. This is a puzzling puzzle. the result, because at such an early age there was not enough time for the development of such a large black hole, according to standard theory. Several scenarios have been proposed to solve this mystery.
One possibility is that black holes, caused by the deaths of first-generation stars in the early universe, were accumulating matter at very high speeds. Another scenario is that a primordial gas cloud, which has not been enriched with chemical elements heavier than helium, could immediately collapse to form a[{”attribute=””>blackholewithamassofafewhundredthousandsolarmassesandsubsequentaccretemattertoevolveintothehyper-massiveblackholesobservedatlaterepochsFinallydensenuclearstarclustersatthecentersofbabygalaxiesmayhaveproducedintermediatemassblackholeseedsviastellarcollisionsormergingofstellar-massblackholesandthenbecomemuchmoremassiveviaaccretion[{”attribute=””>blackholewithamassofafewhundredthousandsolarmassesandsubsequentlyaccretemattertoevolveintothehyper-massiveblackholesobservedatlaterepochsFinallydensenuclearstarclustersatthecentersofbabygalaxiesmayhaveproducedintermediatemassblackholeseedsviastellarcollisionsormergingofstellar-massblackholesandthenbecomemuchmoremassiveviaaccretion
This illustration shows the populations of known black holes (large black dots) and the candidate black hole progenitors in the early universe (shaded regions). Credit: Roberto Maiolino, University of Cambridge
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“Webb is about to open a completely new discovery space in this area. It is possible that the first black hole seeds originally formed in the ‘baby universe,’ within just a few million years after the big bang. Webb is the perfect ‘time machine’ to learn about these primeval objects. Its exceptional sensitivity makes Webb capable of detecting extremely distant galaxies, and because of the time required for the light emitted by the galaxies to travel to us, we will see them as they were in the remote past.
“Webb’s NIRSpec instrument is particularly well suited to identify primeval black hole seeds. My colleagues in the NIRSpec Instrument Science Team and I will be searching for their signatures during ‘active’ phases, when they are voraciously gobbling matter and growing rapidly. In these phases the material surrounding them becomes extremely hot and luminous and ionizes the atoms in their surroundings and in their host galaxies.
“NIRSpec will disperse the light from these systems into spectra, or ‘rainbows.’ The rainbow of active black hole seeds will be characterised by specific ‘fingerprints,’ features of highly ionized atoms. NIRSpec will also measure the velocity of the gas orbiting in the vicinity of these primeval black holes. Smaller black holes will be characterized by lower orbital velocities. Black hole seeds formed in pristine clouds will be identified by the absence of features associated with any element heavier than helium.
“I look forward to using Webb’s unprecedented capabilities to search for these black hole progenitors, with the ultimate goal of understanding their nature and origin. The early universe and the realm of black holes seeds is a completely uncharted territory that my colleagues and I are very excited to explore with Webb.”
— Roberto Maiolino, professor of experimental astrophysics and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge
Written by:
- Jonathan Gardner, Webb deputy senior project scientist, <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
NASA-Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."-” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute=””>NASA[{“attribute=””>NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
- Stefanie Milam, Webb deputy project scientist for planetary science, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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