Last week, NASA reported the discovery of a putative "missing link" between the universe's initial supermassive black holes and young, star-forming galaxies, which helps explain some of the universe's mysteries.
Astronomers discovered GNz7q, a fast-developing black hole using Hubble Space Telescope data. According to the scientists, it's been "lurking unobserved" in one of the most studied sections of the sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North field.
Researchers reported the findings in the journal Nature. The study title is "A dusty compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn."
Artistic impression of a young growing black hole emerging from the center of a dusty starburst galaxy.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope Captures Supermassive Black Holes
How did supermassive black holes, which may be billions of times the mass of the sun, get so big and so fast? Scientists are now closer to finding an answer than they have ever been.
A team of international researchers used archival data from Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys to conclude that the "monster" object existed barely 750 million years after the Big Bang, during the "cosmic dawn" - the time immediately after the beginning of our universe. It's the very first of its sort to be found.
News18 said scientists discovered a compact source of ultraviolet and infrared light that they could not attribute to star formation alone but rather to the radiation predicted from materials falling into a black hole. The best explanation, they argue, is a dust-covered fast-growing black hole that would someday emerge as a quasar, a dazzling source of light at the center of a newborn galaxy.
Reports define black holes as areas of space with such a high concentration of mass that a gravitational field forms from which no particle, including light, can escape.
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Theories and computer calculations indicated that this sort of black hole would turn into an exceptionally brilliant quasar, but it had never been detected - until now.
Is This The Universe's Missing Link?
Dr. Seiji Fujimoto, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, explained in a SciNews report: "Our analysis suggests that GNz7q is the first example of a rapidly growing black hole in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy at an epoch close to the earliest supermassive black hole known in the Universe."
GNz7q, according to Dr. Fujimoto and colleagues, might constitute a missing connection between these two kinds of items.
The dusty starburst galaxy and the quasar are present in GNz7q, with the quasar light revealing the dust's reddish hue.
GNz7q also lacks several characteristics seen in normal, highly brilliant quasars (such as radiation from the supermassive black hole's accretion disk), which is most likely because of the central black hole in GN7q is still in a youthful and less massive phase.
These characteristics are identical to those of a young, transition phase quasar anticipated in simulations but never found in the same high-redshift universe as the brilliant quasars discovered up to 7.6.
Unfortunately, BigThink said GNz7q's "disk emission" light is missing, and the quasar light has been considerably reddened. It suggests that the quasar's core is dust-obscured and has extremely high star creation rates.
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