NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a supermassive black hole hidden in an ancient “Jekyll and Hyde” galaxy that changes its appearance depending on the angle from which it is viewed.
The galaxy, nicknamed Virgil, looked like a normal star-forming galaxy when observed at optical wavelengths (the kind of light that the human eye and optical telescopes like Hubble can see). However, when JWST observed celestial bodies in infrared light through the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), a monster black hole was visible at the center of the galaxy.
“Virgil has two personalities,” University of Arizona astronomer George Rieke, who co-led the discovery, said in a statement on Dec. 10. “The ultraviolet light and optics show its ‘good’ side, a typical young galaxy quietly forming stars. But when the MIRI data is added, Virgil transforms into a host to a heavily hidden supermassive black hole pouring out enormous amounts of energy.”
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Rieke and his colleagues published their findings on November 17 in The Astrophysical Journal. This discovery suggests that some of the most extreme objects in our universe may be invisible unless observed at infrared wavelengths.
Because light takes a long time to travel across a galaxy, when powerful telescopes like JWST observe distant objects, they appear to have appeared in the distant past. Essentially, JWST acts like a time machine to the early universe. JWST shows Virgil as he existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. (By the way, the age of the universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years.)
Researchers classified Virgil as a small red dot (LRD). This is the name given to a mysterious red object that appears in JWST observations of the distant early universe and is not fully understood by astronomers.
LRDs appear in large quantities about 600 million years after the Big Bang, and rapidly decline about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Observing galaxies like Virgil should help researchers unravel the mysteries of the LRD. LRDs are thought to be associated with actively feeding supermassive black holes that are heavily obscured by dust.
JWST’s Virgil observations will also help researchers better understand how supermassive black holes grew in the early universe. At the center of Virgil is a so-called “supermassive” black hole, meaning it is so large that it would not be possible to exist in its host galaxy, the statement said.
Astronomers thought that the black hole at the center of a galaxy grows at the same rate as its host, with the galaxy first forming and the black hole growing over time as large amounts of matter coalesce at its center. However, these JWST observations suggest that the opposite may be true. First the black hole appears, then the galaxy around it.
“JWST showed that our ideas about how supermassive black holes form were almost completely wrong,” Rieke said. “In many cases, black holes actually appear to be further ahead than galaxies. That’s the most interesting thing we’re discovering.”
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