Scientists using James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have identified early black holes found so far, dating back more than 13 billion years.
The Black Hole and its home galaxy, together called the Capers-Lrd-Z9, existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. According to a study published on August 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, its properties help us understand what the universe is like in its elusive early days.
“When you’re looking for a black hole, this is just as much as you can actually go,” Anthony Taylor, co-author of Austin, a University of Texas astronomer, said in a statement. “We’re really pushing the boundaries of what technology today can detect.”
You might like it
CAPERS-LRD-Z9 is a type of galaxy called “Little Red Dots” and is named because when observed with JWST’s powerful infrared sensors, they appear to emit small (as the galaxy goes) and emit red light. According to current major theory of cosmology, Little Red Dots shine brightly.
“The discovery of Little Red Dot was a major surprise from early JWST data, as it didn’t look like the galaxy seen on the Hubble Space Telescope,” UT Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein said in a statement. “We are now in the process of understanding what they are and how they turned out.”
To better understand the nature of Capers-Lrd-Z9 and such small red dots, the researchers investigated the galaxy at JWST. The team discovered a clear pattern of light wavelengths created when fast-moving gas fell into a black hole. Astronomers have discovered several objects farther than Capers-Lrd-Z9, which could be black holes, but this pattern has confirmed Capers-Lrd-Z9 to date black holes, suggesting that the black holes may be at the center of other small red dots.
Related: James Webb Telescope captures one of the deepest scenery in the universe – Space Photo of the Week
There are quite a few black holes in the center of Capers-Lrd-Z9. It is about 38 million times larger than the Sun or about 10 times larger than Sagittarius A*, an ultra-large black hole in the heart of the Milky Way, but there are quite a few wiggling rooms to estimate. Scientists also believe that black holes have roughly 5% of all the stars in a galaxy, and have a proportion that is far greater than modern galaxies.
“This adds to the evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought,” Finkelstein said. “Or they started out much bigger than our model predicted.”
The Capers-LRD-Z9 also helps explain why the red dot is almost red. The dense clouds of gas surrounding the black hole could shift the emitted light to a longer red wavelength, researchers predicted.
Further research on Capers-LRD-Z9 could provide more information on black holes and galaxies in the early universe, scientists wrote in the study.
“This is a good test object for us,” Taylor said in a statement. “We were unable to study the evolution of early black holes until recently. We look forward to what we can learn from this unique object.”
Source link
