by |
Khaled Younes |
Friday 15 April 2022 – 12:34 AM
Astronomers have confirmed that they have identified an ancestor of a supermassive black hole that was born relatively soon after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, and simulations have indicated the existence of such objects, but experts say this is the first actual discovery.
The distant object, which has properties that lie between the properties of the galaxy and the so-called quasar, was discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope. From its position in space, the 32-year-old observatory can peer into the depths of the universe more than it is on Earth.
And in astronomy, additional research means being able to observe phenomena that occurred in earlier cosmic periods – because light and other types of radiation would travel longer to reach us.
The research was conducted by an international team of experts led by astrophysicists at the Niels Bohr Institute, the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark.
“The discovery connects two rare groups of celestial bodies, dusty starbursts and luminous quasars, and thus provides a new way to understand the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe,” said Seiji Fujimoto, from the University of Copenhagen.
The newly discovered object – which the team called GNz7q – was born 750 million years after the Big Bang, and is generally accepted as the beginning of the universe as we know it.
The discovery is linked to a certain type of quasar, which are highly luminous objects.
Images from Hubble and other advanced telescopes showed that quasars occur in the cores of galaxies. The host galaxy for GNz7q is a dense galaxy that forms stars 1,600 times faster than our Milky Way.
Stars, in turn, create and heat cosmic dust, making it glow in infrared light to the point that the GNz7q host is more luminous in dust emission than any other known object in this period of cosmic dawn.
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In recent years, it has been shown that luminous quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses, and surrounded by huge amounts of gas. formidable.
“Understanding how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the early universe has become a big mystery,” said Professor Gabriel Brammer, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen.
Theorists predict that these black holes are undergoing an early stage of rapid growth: a dust-compressed object emerges from a dust-filled galaxy, then transitions to a compact, luminous, unobscured object by expelling surrounding gas and dust.
He added: “Although luminous quasars have already been found even in the early ages of the universe, the transitional phase of the rapid growth of both the black hole and its star-exploding host has not been found in similar epochs.
Furthermore, the observed properties are in excellent agreement with theoretical simulations and indicate that GNz7q is the first example of a rapidly growing phase transition black hole in the core of a dust star, a predecessor to a later supermassive black hole.
Interestingly, GNz7q was found in the middle of an extensively studied sky field known as the Hubble GOODS North.
The team now hopes to search for similar objects with the help of NASA’s newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.
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