According to the latest report, in a recent study, astronomers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and other institutions identified a “supermassive black hole ancestor”, which was born 13.8 billion years ago. shortly after the Big Bang.
Previous simulation studies have suggested such an object exists, but astronomers say this is the first substantial discovery. This distant object, with properties between a galaxy and a quasar, was discovered by astronomers with the Hubble Space Telescope.
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As an iconic space telescope, after its launch in 1990, the Hubble telescope has become the most important space exploration instrument in the history of human astronomy. Unaffected by weather changes and air pollution, it can see farther than ground-based telescopes and look deeper into the depths of the universe.
In astronomy, “seeing further” means being able to observe phenomena that occurred earlier in the universe, and the light and other types of radiation emitted by these phenomena take longer to travel before we can detect them.
The object discovered by an international team of astrophysicists links two rare astronomical groups dusty starbursts and unusually bright quasars to provide insights into the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe.
The newly discovered object, dubbed GNz7q by the research team, was born 750 million years after the Big Bang, which is generally considered the beginning of the universe as we know it. The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, and the period when GNz7q was born is known as the “Cosmic Dawn”.
The discovery of GNz7q is associated with a special type of quasar. Scientists believe that quasars are a class of extremely bright active galactic nuclei, and the radiation emitted from active galactic nuclei is produced by the accretion of matter from the supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope and other advanced telescopes show that quasars appear right at the center of galaxies.
GNz7q’s host galaxy is a very active star-forming galaxy, producing stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way. These stars, in turn, generate and heat cosmic dust, causing it to emit infrared radiation so intense that GNz7q’s host galaxy was brighter than any other known celestial body at the cosmic dawn.
In recent years, astronomers have discovered that bright quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, which have masses ranging from millions to tens of billions of times the mass of the sun and are surrounded by vast amounts of gas. As the gas falls toward the black hole, it heats up due to friction, creating a strong glowing effect.
Understanding how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the early universe has become a major mystery. Theorists had predicted that these black holes would go through an early stage of rapid growth: a dust-red, dense object emerges from a starburst galaxy obscured by dust, and then gradually becomes a dust-obscured starburst galaxy by expelling surrounding gas and dust. A luminous dense object that is not obscured.
Although studies have found bright quasars in the earliest stages of the universe, no transitional stages in the rapid growth of black holes and their starburst hosts have been found during similar periods.
Furthermore, the observed features of GNz7q are in good agreement with theoretical simulations, suggesting that this is the first example of a dusty stellar core transforming and growing rapidly into a black hole, an object that is the ancestor of later supermassive black holes.
Interestingly, GNz7q was discovered in the center of a widely studied region of the sky known as the Hubble GOODS North. This shows that important discoveries are often hidden in front of you.
For now, the team hopes to search for GNz7q-like objects with the help of NASA’s newly launched James Webb Space Telescope. With the help of the James Webb Telescope, it is possible for scientists to fully characterize these objects and explore their evolution and underlying physics in greater detail. Once in regular operation, the James Webb Telescope will be able to make decisive detections to determine just how common these fast-growing black holes are.
Blackhole with strong gravity
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that radiation of any kind, including light, cannot escape. In the universe, black holes are powerful gravitational sources that can suck dust and gas away from their surroundings. Astronomers believe that the powerful gravitational pull of black holes keeps the stars in galaxies orbiting.
How black holes form, we still know very little. Astronomers believe they may have been the earliest black hole “seeds” formed by the collapse of a huge cloud of gas 100,000 times larger than the sun. Many of these “seeds” merge to form larger supermassive black holes. At the center of every known massive galaxy, astronomers have discovered the existence of supermassive black holes.
Another way of saying it is that the “seed” of a supermassive black hole may come from a massive star, about 100 times the mass of the sun, that eventually forms a black hole after running out of fuel and collapsing. When these giant stars die, they can also go into a “supernova,” a massive explosion that ejects material from the star’s outer layers into deep space.
What is a quasar?
Quasar is short for “quasi-stellar radio source”, which describes bright active galactic nuclei. At the center of all known galaxies is a supermassive black hole. When the gas and dust flowing into the black hole reaches a certain level, it may lead to the formation of “quasars”: under the strong gravitational effect of the black hole, the dust, gas and a part of the stellar matter in the vicinity of the black hole surround the black hole, forming a huge, high-speed rotating Accretion disk; when the material inside the accretion disk falls into the black hole, energy is released in the form of electromagnetic radiation, which can be thousands of times brighter than ordinary galaxies such as the Milky Way.
Moreover, Quasars are typically 3,260 light-years across but only exist on average for 10 to 100 million years, making them relatively difficult to detect in galaxies that are billions of years old. Particles ejected from the rapidly spinning accretion disk travel outward at nearly the speed of light, driving these high-energy “engines” to emit extremely bright light and radio waves.
