Supermassive black hole active 570 million years after the Big Bang

July 6 () –

Astronomers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as published in ‘The Astrophysical Journal Letters’.

The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed about 570 million years after the Big Bang, and its black hole is less massive than any so far identified in the early universe.

In addition to the black hole in CEERS 1019, the researchers identified two other smaller black holes that existed 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The JWST also identified eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was between 470 and 675 million years old.

The evidence was provided by the JWST’s CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) program, led by Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas (United States). The program combines highly detailed near- and mid-infrared images of the JWST and data known as spectra, all of which were used to make these discoveries.

“Looking at this distant object with this telescope is a lot like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies close to our own,” said Rebecca Larson, a recent UT Ph.D. who led the study.

CEERS 1019 stands out not only for how long it has existed, but also for how relatively light its black hole weighs. It was around 9 million solar masses, much less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes.

These colossi are typically more than a billion times the mass of the Sun, and they are easier to spot because they are so much brighter. The black hole of CEERS 1019 is more similar to the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, It is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun.

Although smaller, this black hole existed much earlier, so it is still difficult to explain how it formed so soon after the universe began. Researchers have long known that the smallest black holes must have existed earlier in the universe, but it wasn’t until the JWST began observing that they were able to make definitive detections.

The team was not only able to tease out which emissions in the spectrum were coming from the black hole and which from its host galaxy, but also was able to determine the amount of gas ingested by the black hole and the rate of star formation of its galaxy..

The team found that this galaxy is ingesting as much gas as it can while producing new stars. The team turned to footage to find out why. Visually, CEERS 1019 appears as three bright groups, not as a single circular disk.

“We are not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, a CEERS team member and associate professor of astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “A galaxy merger could be partly responsible for fueling the activity in this galaxy’s black hole, and that could also lead to increased star formation.”

These are just the first breakthrough discoveries from the CEERS survey. “Until now, research on objects in the early universe was largely theoretical,” Finkelstein says. “With Webb, we can not only see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, but now we can begin to measure them accurately. That’s the tremendous power of this telescope.”

In the future, the JWST data may also be used to explain how the first black holes formed, revising researchers’ models of how black holes grew and evolved in the first few hundred million years of the planet’s history. universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope is an international program run by NASA with its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

The CEERS survey is extensive and much remains to be explored. Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, USA, and his team quickly discovered another pair of small black holes in the data.

The first, within the galaxy CEERS 2782, was the easiest to distinguish.. There is no dust to obscure JWST’s view, so the researchers were able to determine immediately when its black hole existed in the history of the universe: just 1.1 billion years after the big bang.

The second black hole, in the galaxy CEERS 746, existed a little earlier, 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Its bright accretion disk, a ring of gas and dust surrounding its supermassive black hole, is still partly shrouded in dust.

“The central black hole is visible, but the presence of dust suggests that it could be inside a galaxy that is also ejecting stars at high speed.“Kocevski explains.

Like the one in CEERS 1019, the other two newly described black holes (in the galaxies CEERS 2782 and CEERS 746) are also “lightweights”, at least when compared to known supermassive black holes at those distances. They are only about 10 million times the mass of the Sun.

“Researchers have known for a long time that there must be lower-mass black holes in the early universe. Webb is the first observatory that can capture them so clearly,” Kocevski says. everywhere, waiting to be discovered.

Before the JWST, all three black holes were too faint to detect. “With other telescopes, these targets look like ordinary star-forming galaxies, not active supermassive black holes,” adds Finkelstein.

The JWST’s sensitive spectra also allowed the researchers to accurately measure the distances, and thus the age, of galaxies in the early Universe. Team members Pablo Arrabal Haro, of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, and Seiji Fujimoto, postdoctoral researcher and Hubble fellow at UT, They identified 11 galaxies that existed between 470 and 675 million years after the Big Bang.

Not only are they extremely distant, but the fact that so many bright galaxies were detected is remarkable. The researchers theorized that the JWST would detect fewer galaxies than are being found at these distances.

“I am overwhelmed by the number of highly detailed spectra of remote galaxies that Webb has returned,” said Arrabal Haro. This data is absolutely incredible.”

These galaxies are rapidly forming stars, but they are not yet as chemically enriched as galaxies much closer to home.

“Webb was the first to detect some of these galaxies,” Fujimoto explains. “This set, along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, could change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution over time.” of cosmic history,” he adds.