- 4307 - OLDEST BLACKHOLE, OLDEST GALAXY - The James Webb Space Telescope's discovery of the universe's oldest black holes is giving astronomers some vital clues for how they came to be. This is the oldest black hole ever seen, an ancient monster with the mass of 1,600,000 suns lurking 13 billion years in the universe's past.
------------------ 4307 - OLDEST BLACKHOLE, OLDEST GALAXY
- The Webb Telescope
cameras enable it to look back in time to our universe's beginnings, spotted
the supermassive black hole at the center of the infant galaxy GN-z11 just 440 million years after the
universe began. We are seeing very old
light. The older it gets the more
expanding space stretches it into the infrared light wavelengths.
-
- It's one of
countless black holes that gorged themselves to terrifying scales during the
period about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe began
glowing for a billion years.
-
- Black holes in the
early universe can't grow quietly and gently as many black holes do in the
local present-day universe. They
experience some peculiar birth or formation, and some peculiar growth.
-
- Closer to the
present-day, astronomers believe black holes are born from the collapse of
giant stars. But however they come to be, they grow by ceaselessly gorging on
gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As they feast, friction causes the
material spiraling into the black holes' maws to heat up, and they emit light
that can be detected by telescopes, turning them into “active galactic nuclei”
(AGN).
-
- The most extreme
AGN are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier
than the sun and shed their gaseous cocoons with light blasts trillions of
times more luminous than the brightest stars.
-
- Because light
travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper that
scientists look into the universe, the more remote light they intercept and the
further back in time they see. To spot the black hole in the new study, the
astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras, the JWST's Mid-Infrared
Instrument (MIRI) and Near Infrared Camera, and used the cameras' built-in
spectrographs to break down the light into its component frequencies.
-
- By deconstructing
these faint glimmers from the universe's earliest years, they found an
unexpected spike among the frequencies contained within the light. This was a key sign that the hot material
around a black hole was beaming out faint traces of light across the universe.
-
- The most popular
explanations for how these early black holes grew so fast are that they formed
from the sudden collapse of giant gas clouds or that they came from many
mergers between clumps of stars and black holes. Astronomers haven't ruled out that some of
these black holes could have been seeded by hypothesized "primordial"
black holes, thought to be created moments after the universe began.
-
- An early
blackhole needs to be a pristine cloud, yet to be enriched by
heavy elements made by the first stars, and one that is fairly massive, from
10,000 to up to a million solar masses.
-
- To prevent such a
cloud from cooling too quickly and collapsing into massive stars first, it must
also be beamed with ultraviolet light, likely from a nearby galaxy or black
hole. So you need this peculiar
condition where the cloud is not getting enriched by absorbing exploded star
material, but is also next to another galaxy which is producing a lot of
photons.
-
-
- They also spotted six gigantic galaxies, each
roughly the size of our own Milky Way, that formed at a bafflingly fast pace,
taking shape just 500 million years after the Big Bang. This group of galaxies from the dawn of the
universe are so massive they shouldn't
exist.
-
- The six gargantuan
galaxies, which contain almost as many stars as the Milky Way despite forming
only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, have been dubbed
"universe breakers". The
discovery calls our entire understanding of galaxy formation into question.
-
- You just don't
expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These
galaxies should not have had time to form.
Cosmologists previously estimated that the process began slowly taking
shape within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Currently
accepted theories suggest that 1 to 2 billion years into the universe's life,
these early proto-galaxies reached adolescence forming into dwarf galaxies that
began devouring each other to grow into ones like our own.
-
- Because light
travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper we look into
the universe, the more remote light we intercept and the further back in time
we see. To peer 13.5 billion years into
the past, the astronomers found that enormous galaxies had already burst into
life very quickly after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 3% of its
current age.
-
- The researchers
say the galaxies are so massive, they are in tension with 99 percent of the
models for cosmology. This means that
either the models need to be altered, or scientific understanding of galaxy
formation requires a fundamental rethink.
-
- The Milky Way
forms about one to two new stars every year.
Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a
year for the entire history of the universe. If even one of these galaxies is
real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology.
-
- Right now, all
evidence points to these celestial objects being galaxies, but the astronomers
haven't ruled out that some of them could be enormous quasars or supermassive
black holes.
-
- Previous imaging
of the early universe by the Hubble Space Telescope didn't detect the giant
galaxies, but JWST is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
-
- The $10 billion
JWST launched to a gravitationally stable location beyond the moon's orbit, a
Lagrange point, in December 2021. The space observatory was designed to read
the earliest chapters of the universe's history in its faintest glimmers of
light which have been stretched to infrared frequencies from billions of years
of travel across the expanding fabric of space-time.
-
- The astronomers say
their next step will be to take a spectrum image of the giant galaxies
providing them with accurate distances and a better idea of the chemical makeup
of the anachronistic monsters hiding at the beginning of the universe.
-
-
January 6, 2023
OLDEST BLACKHOLE, OLDEST
GALAXY 4307
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