Found in a dark corner of space more than 13.03 billion light years away, a quasar contains a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times as massive as the sun in its heart.
The quasar, named J0313-1806, dates from a time when the universe was only 670 million years old, about 5% of its current age. At such a distance, J0313-1806 becomes the record holder for the earliest black hole to be dethroned the previous champion, J1342 + 0928, which was discovered in 2017 and existed when the universe was only 690 million years old.
The discovery, announced during the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday, helps shed light on the environment in the ancient universe. But, like any good story in astrophysics, it leaves researchers with a series of puzzling questions.
Quasars are extremely bright objects - the brightest in the universe. They lie in the center of galaxies, but in their own center lies a supermassive black hole that is billions to billions of times more massive than the sun. The intense gravity surrounding the black hole traps gas and dust, and may even tear apart stars, leaving a trail of debris in a disk that surrounds it. The debris whipped around at incredible speeds, emitting extreme amounts of energy that observers on Earth can see as bright light across the electromagnetic spectrum.
And it is bright.
J0313-1806, for example, is 1000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way.
Astronomers have been able to see the quasar using a handful of ground-based observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the world's largest radio telescope, and two observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The observations allowed the researchers to confirm the distance with high precision and study some of the properties of the supermassive black hole at the center of the quasar.
Their calculations assume that the mass of the black hole is about 1.6 billion times that of the sun. However, this is a problem. Since the black hole cannot be more than 670 million years old, traditional theories of black hole growth cannot explain its size in such a short period of time. Our current understanding of the formation of black holes is that stars collapse. However, the researchers say that cannot explain why the J0313-1806 black hole is so large.
"For the black hole to grow to the size we see in J0313-1806, it would have to start with a seed black hole of at least 10,000 solar masses," said Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and co-author of one upcoming paper describing the find. "That would only be possible in a direct collapse scenario."
This scenario assumes that it isn't star that collapses into a black hole, but instead large amounts of cold hydrogen gas in a cloud. The direct collapse theory is one of the ways to explain why astronomers find such massive black holes in the early Universe, but it isn't the only significant find for the team.
Using spectral data, the team also speculates that the supermassive black hole is consuming the equivalent of 25 suns every year - meaning it is still growing. "These quasars are probably still in the process of building their supermassive black holes," said Fan.
The James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch on October 31, could offer scientists another window into the early universe and show how these supermassive beasts are formed.
The work was accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
consequences Update: Clarification of the age of the black hole versus the universe. An earlier version of this article stated that the black hole is only 670 million years old. Room calendar 2021 from CNET to stay up to date with the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.
