The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked into the early universe and has discovered black holes that already contain hundreds of millions of solar masses. This new window into the early universe is surprisingly similar to a window closer to home, as reported in four new studies.

Of course, we can’t see supermassive black holes directly. It is the gas around them that heats up and glows as it returns to the mouths of feeding black holes, known as quasars. The emitted light is brightest at ultraviolet wavelengths, but these wavelengths are stretched as they travel towards Earth in the expanding universe, putting light from distant quasars into the full range of JWST’s precision infrared capabilities.

“A fun time for the quasar community!” – exclaims Karl Gebhardt (University of Texas at Austin), who was not involved in the three studies. “I enjoy watching and reading incoming JWST data about black holes in the early universe.”

Four new studies focus on 11 quasars dating back to the cosmic dawn. One of them, led by Rebecca Larson (Rochester Institute of Technology), reported that the furthest known quasar is just 580 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 8.7). Despite the youth of the universe in which this quasar lives, it has already reached a mass of 9 million Suns. This research, which is part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) study, Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The eight additional quasars come from the ASPIRE program (short for Spectroscopic Investigation of Displaced Halos in the Reionization Period) designed to observe a total of 25 quasars. Astronomers have previously found that the black holes powering these eight quasars have masses between 600 million and 3 billion solar masses. (For comparison, the black hole at the center of our galaxy only has a mass of 4 million suns.) JWST’s more precise measurements confirm that previous measurements, though slightly overestimated, are almost accurate: the mass range of the new sample is 600 million to 2 billion suns. Jinyi Yang (Steward Observatory) and colleagues report in the journal Astrophysical Journal LettersIt confirms the existence of black holes with billions of solar masses about 800 million years after the Big Bang.

in the third study in Astrophysical Journal Letters Feige Wang (also from Steward Observatory) and colleagues discovered that one of these eight quasars is part of a much larger cosmic structure. . This quasar and 10 other galaxies lie along a strand twice as wide. Each galaxy is filled with newborn stars that appear with the characteristic signature of double-ionized oxygen. The filament is huge, spanning a few arc minutes in the sky and millions of light years in space.

Wang’s team claims that this structure is actually a cluster of galaxies in the process of being formed. But it has been warning ever since firstset still coming together, much larger than its adult siblings. “[Протокластери] “These structures serve as excellent indicators of the large-scale extreme density of galaxies, or the underlying density of dark matter in the early universe.”

As luck would have it, the biggest breakthrough came from a fourth study published in the US. Nature. Xuheng Ding (University of Tokyo) and colleagues observed two more quasars, first detected by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

In general, a supermassive black hole outpaces its entire parent galaxy in its insane power supply, especially at such extreme distances. But JWST’s eagle-eye cameras allowed astronomers to decipher the two systems. And here astronomers discovered something unexpected.

For decades, astronomers have noticed that quasars and their galaxies grow together. This is despite the fact that even supermassive black holes do not have gravitational attraction to affect much more than their immediate surroundings. Perhaps some have theorized that the feeder black hole drives jets, winds, or some other form of feedback that regulates the growth of both it and its host galaxy, so that they grow together. If that were the case, then we might expect galaxies and the black holes they contain to relate to each other differently over cosmic time as they interact.

However, Ding’s team found that, at least for the two quasars they studied, the ratio between the mass of the black hole and the mass of the galactic star was exactly the same as what we observed in the closer quasars. (Interestingly, the recently discovered CEERS quasar fits this relationship as well, but its history goes back even further.)

Gebhardt says he was surprised by the result. “Stellar mass is really hard to get and my first reaction when I read the summary was skepticism,” he adds. “However [дослідники] He did a great job.”

It is quite possible that the supermassive black holes in these two galaxies provided feedback even at such an early time. These two quasars may even be rapidly evolving emissions that do not represent the evolution of most galaxy-black hole pairs. While two data points are not enough to draw firm conclusions, there are still many early quasars waiting to be observed by JWST. Our window to the early evolution of supermassive black holes will soon turn into a more complete picture. Source