Approaching a distant region of space, more than 13 billion light-years away, is a bright thing. “quasar“powered by a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times more massive than the sun. Recently, astronomers saw the galactic beast, marking the oldest of its kind.
The old one quasar, defined as a remote, massive, bright active galactic nucleus that emits enormous amounts of energy, has been christened J0313-1806 by an international team, led by researchers at the University of Arizona. It dates back to a staggering 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the children’s universe was only 5% of its current age.
This makes it the oldest quasar, that is, the oldest known. The previous year, the record quasar, was also discovered in 2017.
J0313-1806 is only 20 million light-years away from its predecessor, but it is supermassive black hole is twice as heavy – challenging known theories about the formation of black holes in the early universe.
The team presented their findings, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, at this week’s 237th Virtual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“This is the first evidence of how a supermassive black hole affects its host galaxy surrounding it,” the author said in a statement, Feige Wang. “From observations of less distant galaxies, we know this must happen, but we’ve never seen it happen so early in the universe.”
NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva
Scientists believe that supermassive black holes swallow a large amount of matter, such as gas or stars, to form an accretion disk that revolves around it, creating a quasar. These objects are the brightest in the cosmos because of this huge amount of energy.
The celestial object is also the first of its kind to provide evidence of a hot, gaseous wind from its black hole at one-fifth the speed of light, a startling discovery.
The formation of the quasar, however, remains somewhat enigmatic.
Black holes usually form when a star explodes, dies, and collapses, and supermassive black holes grow as black holes fuse over time. However, the quasars of the primitive universe are too young to have become so large, so quickly, in this way.
The supermassive black hole in the center of J0313-1806 is so large (it still grows as it ingests the massive equivalent of about 25 suns each year), it cannot be explained by a number of previous hypotheses.
“This tells you that no matter what you do, the seed of this black hole must have been formed by a different mechanism,” co-author Xiaohui Fan said. “In this case, one involving large amounts of primordial and cold hydrogen gas collapsing directly into a black seed hole.”
In this scenario, instead of collapsing a star in a black hole, they are responsible for large amounts of cold hydrogen gas.
When quasars exploit their surroundings, they remove much of the cold gas needed for star formation. Therefore, scientists believe that supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies may be the reason why galaxies stop forming new stars.
“We believe those supermassive black holes were the reason why many of the big galaxies stopped forming stars at some point,” Fan said. “We observe this ‘off’ in lower redshifts, but so far we did not know to what extent this process began in the history of the universe. This quasar is the first evidence that temptation had occurred in times past. very early “.
J0313-1806 pumps 200 solar masses a year. For comparison, the Milky Way it forms stars at the “slow pace” of about one solar mass each year.
“This is a relatively high rate of star formation, similar to that observed in other quasars of similar age, and indicates that the host galaxy is growing very rapidly,” Wang said.
“Presumably, these quasars are still building their supermassive black holes,” Fan added. “Over time, the quasar exit heats up and pushes all the gas out of the galaxy, and the black hole has nothing left to eat and will stop growing. This is evidence of how these early galaxies grew. masses and their quasars “.
The quasar offers a rare view of galaxy formation at the beginning of the universe, but researchers need a more powerful telescope to study it more thoroughly. From NASA James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch this year, will allow for more detailed research.
“With ground-based telescopes, we can only see one point source,” Wang said. “Future observations could allow us to solve the quasar in more detail, show the structure of its exit and how far the wind extends to its galaxy, and this would give us a much better idea of its evolutionary stage. “.