"Are there baby quasars?": Is the James Webb Space Telescope spotting tiny giants in the deep past?
Could SMBHs be growing even faster than we first thought? Or their shape is different?
Giant Quasar and Little Red Spot. A NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRCam image of the bright quasar J1148+5251, a very rare active supermassive black hole with a mass of 10 billion solar masses. The quasar's light, an orange star-like source with six distinct diffraction spikes, was emitted 13 billion years ago. The existence of such massive black holes in the young universe poses a significant challenge to theories of black hole and galaxy formation. Simultaneously, it captured the image of small red dot-like objects, the so-called Little Red Dots. Several such objects appear in almost every JWST depth image. Like quasar J1148+5251, the light from these objects (in this case emitted 12.5 billion years ago) is fed by supermassive black holes. However, these black holes have a hundred to a thousand times less mass and are heavily shrouded by dust (which makes them appear red). Small red dots can indicate galaxies that are in an evolutionary phase that precedes the bright quasar phase, thus helping researchers understand the formation and role of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Matthee (ISTA), R. Mackenzie (ETH Zurich), D. Kashino (National Observatory of Japan), S. Lilly (ETH Zurich)
The James Webb Space Telescope has made one of the most unexpected discoveries in its first year of operation: a large number of faint red dots in the distant universe could change the way we understand the origin of supermassive black holes.
The research, led by Jorryt Matthee, assistant professor of astrophysics at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA), is now published in the Astrophysical Journal.
A cluster of tiny red dots found in a small region of our night sky may actually be an unexpected breakthrough for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in its first year of operation. These objects could not be distinguished from ordinary galaxies through the "eye" of the Hubble Space Telescope.
"While not specifically designed for this purpose, JWST helped us determine that faint red dots—found in the universe's distant past—are miniaturized versions of supermassive black holes. These special objects can Change the way we do it," says Matti, assistant professor at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA) and lead author of the study. "Think about the creation of black holes.
The current findings could bring us one step closer to answering one of astronomy's biggest conundrums: According to current models, some supermassive black holes in the early universe simply grew "too fast." Then how were they formed?"
Cosmic points of no return
Scientists have long considered black holes a mathematical curiosity, until their existence became increasingly apparent. These bottomless pits can have such dense mass and strong gravity that nothing can escape their gravity. They suck up everything, including cosmic dust, planets, and stars, and reshape the space and time around them in such a way that even light cannot escape.
The theory of general relativity, published more than a century ago by Albert Einstein, predicted that black holes could have any mass. Some of the most fascinating black holes are supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which can reach millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astrophysicists agree that there is an SMBH at the center of almost every large galaxy. The proof that Sagittarius A* is an SMBH at the center of our galaxy with more than four million times the mass of the Sun won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Too bulky to be
However, not all SMBHs are the same. While Sagittarius A* can be compared to a dormant volcano, some SMBHs grow rapidly by absorbing astronomical amounts of matter. Therefore, they become so bright that they can be seen all the way to the edge of the ever-expanding universe. These SMBHs are called quasars and are among the brightest objects in the universe.
"One issue with quasars is that some of them appear to be too massive for the age of the universe in which the quasars are observed. We call them 'problem quasars,'" Matti says. We call
"If we consider that quasars originate from exploding massive stars—and we know their maximum growth rate from the general laws of physics—some of them appear to have grown faster than possible. Like looking at A period of five years. A child is two meters tall, he explains.
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