James Webb Space Telescope Spotted Starlight From 2 Early Galaxies Host Feeding Supermassive Black Holes

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered starlight behind feeding supermassive black holes. JWST enabled astronomers to witness the sight for the first time using JWST.

James Webb Space Telescope Witnesses Feeding Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers have observed illumination from two early galaxies that contain feeding supermassive black holes, or quasars, for the first time thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The discovery may eventually enable researchers to comprehend how supermassive black holes rapidly attain masses equal to millions or billions of suns and how they coevolve with the host galaxies, Space.com reported.

According to team member and Max Planck Institute for Astronomy researcher, Knud Janke, in a statement, they were astounded 25 years ago when they discovered host galaxies from three billion years ago using ground-based telescopes. They were able to investigate the pinnacle of black hole growth 10 billion years ago thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. And today, the galaxies where the first supermassive black holes arose may now be seen with the use of JWST.

The scientists captured images of two of these supposedly active galaxies, which are shown as they were when the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old, was only a billion years old. They determined the masses of the galaxies and the supermassive black holes driving the quasars, J2236+0032 and J2255+0251, respectively.

Since it took these two galaxies 12.9 and 12.8 billion years, respectively, for their light to reach us, they appear to have existed 870 and 880 million years after the Big Bang, according to astronomers.

The measurements showed that the galaxies had masses that are 130 billion and 30 billion times greater than the sun's, respectively. The enormous black holes that feed them have masses that are 1.4 billion solar masses for J2236+0032 and 200 million solar masses for J2255+0251. It demonstrated that the mass of these ancient galaxies and their central black holes are related in the same manner as galaxies detected more recently and consequently closer to the Milky Way.

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Supermassive Black Holes Grow With Galaxies

Some of the most extreme things in the universe are quasars. Powered by supermassive black holes that are encircled by gas and dust, some of which is secreted into the black hole and some of which is blasted out at speeds close to the speed of light, quasars frequently produce light that is brighter than all of the stars in the galaxy in which they are located put together.

Since the discovery of the first quasar in 1963, researchers have uncovered the mechanisms underlying their massive light emission. It was established in the 2000s that galaxies' star masses and their supermassive black holes are correlated, with the star mass of a galaxy being roughly 1000 times bigger than the mass of its core black hole.

Both galaxies with central supermassive black holes that are millions of times as big as the sun and those with black holes that are billions of times as large as our star share the same relationship between the masses of their respective supermassive black holes and their galaxies.

The relationship between the mass of galaxies and the mass of their supermassive black holes may be explained by the fact that both increase as a result of a series of galaxy mergers, each of which results in the black holes at the centers of the merging galaxies crashing violently into one another and producing an even more massive black hole.

As a result, following many mergers, a galaxy's mass will be roughly equal to the average mass of the original galaxy multiplied by the number of other galaxies it merged with, while the mass of the central black hole will be equal to the mass of the original black hole multiplied by the same quantity, resulting in a roughly linear relationship.

Another theory proposes that when a supermassive black hole consumes enough matter to produce a quasar, the radiation it emits controls the amount of material available to power the quasar and create new stars. Therefore, star production in that galaxy slows down when the quasar runs out of fuel and stops growing.