Only 670 million years after the big bang, the quasar J0313-1806 was born. This is the most remote black hole ever discovered.
NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva
A quasar was discovered in a dark corner of space, more than 13.03 billion light-years away, and contains a supermassive black hole that is 1.6 billion times larger than the sun in its heart.
Called J0313-1806, the quasar, as we see it, is from a time when the universe was only 670 million years old, about 5% of its current age. At such a distance, J0313-1806 is dethroned the record holder for the earliest black hole the previous champion, J1342 + 0928, which was discovered in 2017 and existed when the universe was only 690 million years old.
The discovery, announced Tuesday at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, helps illuminate the environment in the ancient universe. But, like any good astrophysics story, it leaves researchers with a number of strange questions.
Quasars are extremely bright objects – the brightest in the universe. They lie in the center of galaxies, but in their own center lies a supermassive black hole, millions to billions of times more massive than the sun. The intense gravity around the black hole traps gas and dust and possibly tears stars apart, leaving a trail of debris in a disk that surrounds it. The debris sweeps around incredibly fast, expelling extreme amounts of energy that observers on Earth can see as bright light in the electromagnetic spectrum.
And this is bright.
J0313-1806, for example, shines 1000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers have been able to locate the quasar using a handful of ground observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the world’s largest radio telescope, and two observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The observations enabled researchers to confirm the distance with great precision and to investigate some of the properties of the supermassive black hole in the center of the quasar.
Their calculations put the mass of the black hole at about 1.6 billion times the mass of the sun. But it does pose a problem. Because the black hole cannot be older than 670 million years, traditional theories about the growth of black holes in such a short period of time cannot account for its size. Our current understanding of black hole formation involves stars collapsing on themselves, but the researchers say this could not explain why J0313-1806’s black hole is so large.
“To grow the black hole to the size we see with J0313-1806, it would have to start with a seed black hole of at least 10,000 solar masses,” said Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and co- author on an upcoming article describing the find. “It would only be possible in the scenario of direct collapse.”
This scenario claims that it is not a star which collapses into a black hole, but instead large amounts of cold hydrogen gas in a cloud. The direct collapse theory is one of the ways to explain why astronomers find such massive black holes in the early universe, but it is not the only important finding for the team.
Using spectral data, the team also speculates that the supermassive black hole swallows the equivalent of 25 suns annually – meaning it continues to grow. “These quasars are presumably still building their supermassive black holes,” Fan said.
The James Webb Space Telescope, which is expected to launch on October 31, could help scientists once again open a window into the early universe and reveal how these supermassive animals originate.
The work was accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Update: Explanation of the age of the black hole towards the universe. An earlier version of this article stated that the black hole is only 670 million years old.