Our understanding of black holes may be getting an update thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In recent images, scientists came across a surprising discovery. It’s a bunch of pale red dots in distant space. These tiny red dots, invisible to previous telescopes like Hubble, are turning out to be something unexpected: a baby version of a supermassive black hole.
A black hole is a region of spacetime with a gravity so strong that not even light can escape. Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the centers of most galaxies and can be millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Some supermassive black holes formed in the early universe appear too large for their age. These “problematic quasars” are a headache for scientists. That’s because current models suggest that quasars cannot grow so large so quickly.
new discovery
The faint red dots discovered by JWST are like missing puzzle pieces. Although these objects are much smaller than giant quasars, they are still confirmed to be supermassive black holes.
Scientists were able to identify them by analyzing the characteristics of certain types of light. “The wider the base of the Hα line, the higher the velocity of the gas.” explain Principal researcher Jorit Massey. “So these spectra show that we’re looking at a very small cloud of gas moving very rapidly and orbiting something very large, like an SMBH.”
These baby black holes have a red color because they are covered in dust. When this dust is removed by the black hole’s own activity, it eventually transforms into the giant quasars we see today. Studying these baby quasars could provide a window into the early lives of these cosmic giants and help us understand how the problematic quasars came to be.
This discovery is astrophysical journal, could be a major advance in our quest to unravel the mystery of how these giants form. But this also highlights the amazing features of her JWST. Massey and his team discovered the baby quasar thanks to a dataset obtained by the EIGER (Emission Line Galaxies and Intergalactic Gas of the Reionization Era) and FRESCO (Full Spectroscopic Observations of the First Reionization Era) collaboration. Did. These are his JWST programs that Matthee participated in.
“The Eiger was specifically designed to study rare blue supermassive quasars and their environments. It was not designed to find tiny red dots. But we discovered them by chance within the same data set. That’s because EIGER uses JWST’s near-infrared camera to capture the emission spectra of every object in the universe. With your arm fully extended with your index finger up, you can see the region of the night sky surveyed. That’s about 1/20th of the nail’s surface. So far, we’ve probably only scratched the surface.”
[via Futurism; image credits: © NASA, ESA, CSA, J. MATTHEE (ISTA), R. MACKENZIE (ETH ZURICH), D. KASHINO (NATIONAL OBSERVATORY OF JAPAN), S. LILLY (ETH ZURICH)]
