In a distant space, more than 13 billion light-years away, it hides’kwasar“fueled by a very big black hole 1.6 billion times more massive than the sun. Astronomers recently spotted the galactic animal and indicated the oldest of its kind.
The ancient kwasar, defined as a bright, massive, remote active galactic nucleus that radiates large amounts of energy, was named J0313-1806 by an international team led by researchers at the University of Arizona. It dates back to an astonishing 670 million years after the Big Bang – when the baby universe was only 5% of its current age.
This makes it the most remote – meaning the earliest – known quasar. The previous quasar for record keeping was also recently discovered, in 2017.
J0313-1806 is only 20 million light-years further than its predecessor, but its very big black hole is twice as heavy – challenging the well-known theories about the formation of black holes in the early universe.
The team presented its findings this week, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, at the virtual 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“This is the earliest evidence of how a supermassive black hole affects its host system around it,” lead author Feige Wang said in a statement. “From observations of less stellar galaxies, we know it has to happen, but we’ve never seen it happen so early in the universe.”
NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva
Scientists believe that supermassive black holes swallow a large amount of matter, such as gas or stars, to form a growth disk that revolves around itself and creates a quasar. These objects are the brightest in the cosmos due to this large amount of energy.
The celestial object is also the first of its kind to provide evidence for the outpouring of hot, gaseous wind from its black hole at a fifth of the speed of light – a surprising discovery.
However, the formation of the quasar remains a bit of a mystery.
Black holes usually form when a star explodes, dies and collapses, and supermassive black holes grow as black holes fuse over time. Quasars in the early universe, however, are too young to become so fast, so fast, in this way.
The supermassive black hole in the middle of J0313-1806 is so large – still growing because it occupies the mass equivalent of about 25 suns annually – it can not be explained by a number of previous hypotheses.
“It tells you that no matter what you do, the seed of this black hole must have been formed by a different mechanism,” co-author Xiaohui Fan said. “In this case, one that involves large amounts of original, cold hydrogen gas that pours directly into a seed-black hole.”
In the scenario, instead of a star collapsing into a black hole, there are large amounts of cold hydrogen gas.
When quasars explode around their environment, they remove much of the cold gas needed to form stars. Therefore, scientists believe that supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies may be the reason why galaxies no longer form new stars.
“We think those supermassive black holes were the reason why a lot of the big galaxies stopped forming stars at some point,” Fan said. “We observe this ‘extinguishing’ at lower redshifts, but until now we did not know how early this process began in the history of the universe. This quasar is the earliest proof that extinguishing could have taken place very early.”
J0313-1806 pumps out 200 solar masses per year. For comparison, the Milky Way form stars at the “quiet pace” of about one solar mass per year.
“It’s a relatively high rate of star formation, similar to that observed in other quasars of similar age, and it tells us that the host system is growing very fast,” Wang said.
“These quasars are presumably still building their supermassive black holes,” Fan added. “Over time, the quasar’s effluent heats up and pushes all the gas out of the galaxy, and then the black hole has nothing left to eat, and it will stop growing. This is proof of how these earliest massive galaxies and their quasars are growing. “
The quasar offers a rare glimpse into the formation of galaxies at the beginning of the universe, but researchers need a more powerful telescope to study it further. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is planned this year, will allow a more detailed investigation.
“With telescopes on the ground, we can only see a point source,” Wang said. “Future observations may make it possible to solve the quasar in more detail, to show the structure of its outflow and how far the wind extends into its galaxy, and this will give us a much better idea of its evolutionary stage. “