Scientists Are Puzzled by the Inexplicable Mass of a Black Hole
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is helping to solve the mystery surrounding a big and very old black hole (JWST).
According to a recent article published in the journal Nature Astronomy, this supermassive black hole, which is located in the center of the galaxy J1120+0641, was already one billion times as massive as our sun when the universe was only 770 million years old.
Scientists have been baffled as to how this black hole came to be so massive during the early stages of the universe, despite the fact that this galaxy was discovered in 2011.
It is estimated that 13.8 billion years ago, a singularity—a very hot and dense point—was the beginning of the cosmos. Large-scale formations such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies were formed when matter was eventually drawn together by gravity following hundreds of thousands of years of expansion and cooling.
Supermassive black holes, which are enormous black holes with masses up to billions of times that of the sun, can be found at the centers of numerous galaxies. Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, is approximately 4 million solar masses in mass. A black hole's mass increases as matter falls into it, and galaxy collisions have the potential to create even larger supermassive black holes by merging their center black holes. But as they consume matter, black holes release radiation that limits their ability to develop further. If a black hole accretes too quickly, the radiation pressure may push material away, preventing it from growing further.
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Supermassive black holes have the ability to consume enough gas and dust to become active galactic nuclei, which in turn powers quasars, some of the universe's brightest and most powerful objects.
There is a quasar at the core of J1120+0641, but astronomers are not sure how such a strong and big supermassive black hole could have formed in the first billion years of the universe.
The authors of the report concluded that J1120+0641's accretion structures "must have assembled very quickly, as they appear fully'mature' less than 760 Myr after the Big Bang."
Over time, scientists have proposed a number of explanations for why ancient black holes grew to such enormous sizes. These include the ideas that early black holes were more effective feeders than modern black holes or that the presence of dust has caused scientists to overestimate the masses of these black holes. This new article uses JWST data to refute one of the main hypotheses proposed to explain these massive old black holes.
According to JWST measurements, the huge revolving dust cloud encircling the supermassive black hole resembles other contemporary supermassive black holes in a similar way. This suggests that the ancient black holes' feeding mechanism was the same as that of modern ones, ruling out the possibility that supermassive black holes' larger size at the beginning of the universe was caused by their more effective feeding.
They also discovered that the ancient black hole was not surrounded by any more dust, which would have caused its mass to be overestimated.
Nonetheless, the researchers did find that the material around the prehistoric black hole was somewhat warmer than the dust around contemporary quasars.
All things considered, the fresh findings further deepen the mystery: early quasars were remarkably typical. Quasars are almost the same throughout all epochs of the Universe, regardless of the wavelengths at which we witness them "Sarah Bosman, co-author of the article and a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and member of the MIRI European consortium, stated in a statement.
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