Astronomers have taken advantage of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the furthest pair of colliding black holes in the known universe. The cosmic monsters – each estimated to be around 50 million suns in size – were discovered more than 13 billion light-years away, at a time just 740 million years after the Big Bang.
Although not the largest or oldest black holes ever discoveredAccording to the authors of the European Space Agency (ESA) study, the merging pair still managed to grow mind-bogglingly large so early in the universe’s history. rack. This discovery further challenges leading theories cosmologythat fail to explain how objects could grow so big and so fast in the universe’s infancy.
“Our findings suggest that mergers are an important route through which black holes can grow rapidly, even at cosmic dawn,” said the study’s lead author. Hannah Übler, a researcher at the University of Cambridge said in the statement. ‘Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant universe, our results also show that massive black holes have determined the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning.’
Black holes They are extremely massive objects with a gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. They are thought to form when massive stars collapse during supernova explosions, and they grow by endlessly gobbling up the gas, dust, stars and other matter in the galaxies that surround them.
The hungriest, most active black holes can reach supermassive status – they can grow to numbers from a few hundred thousand to several billion times the mass of the sun. One of the main ways supermassive black holes can reach such gigantic sizes is by merging with other large black holes in nearby galaxies. phenomenon that has been detected at different times and places in the universe.
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The new discovery is thanks to JWST’s powerful NIRCam infrared instrument, which can detect light from ancient objects over vast cosmic distances and through obscuring dust clouds.
In the new study, published Thursday (May 16) in the Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyresearchers trained the JWST’s infrared cameras on a known black hole system called ZS7, which is located in an early era of the universe known as the cosmic dawn. Previous observations have shown that the system hosts an active galactic core: a feeding, supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, which emits bright light in the form of hot gas and dust. swirls in the craw of the black hole.
Detailed observations with JWST revealed the movement of a dense cloud of gas around the black hole – indicating that it was actively growing – and also indicated the approximate location of a second black hole very nearby, likely in the process of merge with the first.
“Thanks to the unprecedented sharpness of its imaging capabilities, Webb also enabled our team to spatially separate the two black holes,” said Übler. The team estimated one of the black holes to be about 50 million solar masses; the second black hole, which is “buried” in the dense gas cloud, probably has a similar mass to its neighbor, but the researchers couldn’t see the radiation clearly enough to be certain.
This exceptionally old pair of merging black holes adds even more weight to the idea that black holes are a enormous impact on the evolution of galaxies in the early universe it is growing faster than current cosmological theories can explain.
The legacy of these massive mergers can still be felt today in the form of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time that first emerged. predicted by Albert Einsteinand which was recently confirmed to be a ubiquitous feature of the universe – that spread through space when massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars collide.
The ripples released by these distant, colliding samples are too weak to be picked up by current gravitational wave detectors on Earth, the study authors added. However, there are next-generation detectors that will be deployed in space, as those from ESA are planned LISA detector (scheduled for launch in 2035), should be able to detect even the most distant ripples from merging black holes. The new results suggest that evidence of these ancient mergers may be much more abundant than previously thought.