Black holes not only existed at the beginning of time, but also gave birth to new stars and formed supercharged galaxies, according to a new analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

This insight overturns theories about how black holes shape the universe and challenges the classical view that black holes formed after the first stars and galaxies appeared. Instead, black holes may have significantly accelerated the birth of new stars during the first 50 million years, a temporary period in the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe.

“We know that these monster black holes exist at the center of galaxies near the Milky Way, but the big surprise now is that they were also present at the beginning of the universe, almost like the building blocks or seeds of early galaxies.” aforementioned. . lead author Joseph Silk is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and the Institute of Astrophysics at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “They really accelerated everything, like giant star formation accelerators, which meant a complete reversal of what we had previously thought was possible, so much so that it could completely shake up our understanding of how galaxies form.”

The study was recently published Astrophysics Journal Letters. Observed with the Webb Telescope, distant galaxies in the early universe appear much brighter than scientists expected, revealing an unusually large number of young stars and supermassive black holes, Silk said.

Conventional wisdom holds that black holes formed after the collapse of supermassive stars, and galaxies formed after the first stars illuminated the dark early universe. But Silk’s team’s analysis shows that black holes and galaxies coexisted and influenced each other’s fate for the first 100 million years. İpek said that if the entire history of the universe were a 12-month calendar, these years would be like the first days of January.

“We propose that the black hole ejects clouds of fragmented gas, turning them into stars and greatly accelerating the rate of star formation,” Silk said. “Otherwise, it’s very difficult to understand where these bright galaxies come from because they tend to be smaller in the early universe. Why do they have to create stars so quickly?”

Black holes are regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull. Because of this force, they produce strong magnetic fields that cause violent storms, eject turbulent plasma and ultimately act like giant particle accelerators, Silk said. This process is likely why Webb detectors are detecting more of these black holes and bright galaxies than scientists expected, he said.

“We can’t see these strong winds or jets from very far away, but we know they must be there because we see lots of black holes in the early universe,” Silk explained. These huge winds coming from black holes crush nearby gas clouds and turn them into stars. “This is the missing link that explains why the first galaxies were much brighter than we expected.”

Silk’s team suggests that the young universe had two phases. In the first stage, high-speed jets from black holes accelerated star formation, and in the second stage, the jets slowed down. A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, gas clouds collapsed due to the black hole’s supermassive magnetic storms, and new stars were born billions of years later at a rate far above the rate seen in ordinary galaxies, Silk said. He said that star formation slows down because these strong currents switch to an energy-saving state, reducing the gas available for star formation in galaxies.

“We originally thought that galaxies formed when a giant cloud of gas collapsed,” Silk explained. “The biggest surprise was that there was a seed (a massive black hole) in the middle of this cloud, and this helped the interior of the cloud turn into stars much faster than we expected. That’s why the first galaxies are incredibly bright.”

The team hopes that future Webb telescope observations, including more precise counts of stars and supermassive black holes in the early universe, will help confirm their calculations. Silk hopes the observations will also help scientists glean more clues about the evolution of the universe.

“The real question is where did we start? The Sun is one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, with a supermassive black hole in the middle. What is the connection between them?” said. “We will have much better data throughout the year and many of our questions will start to be answered.”