Astronomers using NASA telescopes have discovered the most distant black hole visible in X-rays. The black hole is in a never-before-observed phase of growth where its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy. This result could explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.

Combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a research team was able to find signs of a growing black hole just 470 million years after the Big Bang.

“We needed Webb to find this extremely distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bohdan of the Center for Astrophysics. Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) hosting a new paper on its preprint server arXiv and is planned to be published in a journal Nature Astronomy With an explanation of these results. “We also used the cosmic magnifier, which increased the amount of light we detected.” This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing.

Bohdan and his team found a black hole in a galaxy called UHZ1 in the direction of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. But Webb’s data showed that the galaxy was much further away from the cluster, 13.2 billion light-years from Earth when the universe was only 3% of its current age.

Then, two weeks of observations with Chandra revealed the presence of dense, superheated, X-ray-emitting gas in this galaxy; this was the hallmark of a growing supermassive black hole. Light from the galaxy and X-rays from the gas around its supermassive black hole are magnified by about a factor of four by interfering with the matter in Abell 2744 (via gravitational lensing), amplifying the infrared signal detected by Webb and allowing Chandra to detect the faint X. opportunity is provided. beam source.

This discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes could reach enormous masses shortly after the Big Bang. Do they form directly when large clouds of gas collapse to form black holes weighing about 10,000 to 100,000 suns? Or do they come from the explosions of the first stars that formed black holes weighing about 10 to 100 suns?

“There are physical limits to how fast black holes can grow once formed, but those born with more mass have an advantage. Andy Goulding of Princeton University said: “It’s like planting a seedling, which takes less time to grow into a full-sized tree than if you started with just a seed. ” he said. Goulding co-authored the article Nature Astronomy and lead author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters reporting galaxy distance and mass using the Webb spectrum.

Bohdan’s team found strong evidence that the recently discovered black hole was born with massive mass. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 100 million suns, depending on its luminosity and X-ray energy. This mass range is similar to that of all stars in its home galaxy; This is in stark contrast to the black holes found at the centers of galaxies in the nearby Universe, which usually contain only one-tenth of a percent of their mass. stars of the host galaxy.

The black hole’s large mass at a young age, as well as the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the galaxy found by Webb, are consistent with 2017 theoretical predictions by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University. A supermassive black hole formed directly from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.

“We believe this is the first detection of a ‘massive black hole’ and the best evidence yet that some black holes form from huge clouds of gas,” Natarajan said. said. “For the first time, we see a brief phase in which a supermassive black hole weighs as much as the stars in its galaxy before being left behind.”

Researchers plan to use these and other results combining data from Webb and other telescopes to fill in a bigger picture of the early universe. The Hubble Space Telescope has previously shown that light from distant galaxies is greatly enhanced as matter in the galaxy cluster passes through them; This is part of the motivation for the Webb and Chandra observations described here.

A paper describing Bohdan’s team’s results has been published in Nature Astronomy, and a preprint is also available online. In addition to the above, authors include Orsolja Kovacs (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), Grant Tremblay (CfA), Urmila Chadayamuri (CfA), Marta Volunteeri (Paris Institute of Astrophysics, France), Ralph Kraft (CfA), William Forman (CfA), Krysin Jones (CfA), Yevhen Churazov (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany) and Iryna Zhuravlyova (University of Chicago).

The data Webb used in both papers is part of a study called Ultradeep Nirspec and nirCam Observations Before the Reionization Era (UNCOVER). The report, led by UNCOVER team member Andy Goulding, was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Co-authors include Bohdan and Natarajan, as well as other members of the UNCOVER team. A detailed interpretive paper comparing the observed properties of UHZ1 with theoretical models for massive black hole galaxies is expected to be published. Source