Astronomers have discovered about 750,000 quasars, which are one of the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe. Despite the uninspiring name, J0313-1806 differs from other quasars. This recently spotted object is the oldest known quasar in the universe, with a supermassive black hole over 13 billion years old. In fact, it is so old and large that scientists do not know exactly how it could have formed.
The first quasars were discovered in the middle of the 20th century, but only decades later did we begin to understand what these objects were. A quasar is an active galactic nucleus in which the supermassive black hole that anchors the galaxy draws in matter to form a gaseous growth disk. All these matters that collide while rotating in the black hole release a current of electromagnetic energy that is the hallmark of these objects. J0313-1806, for example, shines 1000 times brighter than our entire galaxy.
J0313-1806 is far – 13.03 billion light years to be exact. That means we see this object, because it was only 670 million years after the big bang still big. Astronomers estimate that J0313-1806 has about 1.6 billion solar masses as observed. It’s not out of line for a supermassive black hole elsewhere in the universe, but they took longer to absorb matter and get bigger. J0313-1806 should not have had time to grow that big in the early universe.
The team used ground instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) to track J0313-1806 last year. It broke the previous record holder for the oldest quasar, which is about 20 million years younger. Current models of black hold formation assume that a star collapses to form a singular, but the ‘seed mass’ for J0313-1806 would have to be at least 10,000 solar masses to reach 1.6 billion as fast.
The M87 supermassive black hole was filmed in 2019.
The study proposes a hypothesis to explain the existence of this bizarre quasar, known as the direct collapse scenario. In this model, it was not a star that collapsed that formed the supermassive black hole. Instead, an enormous cloud of cold hydrogen gas collapsed inward to form a much larger black hole than any star source could yield. This may explain why astronomers see so many giant black holes in the early universe.
Unfortunately, J0313-1806 is so far advanced that we could not gather much more information with current technology. However, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope may be sufficiently accurate for imagery such as J0313-1806. After many years of delays, NASA plans to launch the Webb Telescope by the end of 2021.
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