Super Massive Black Hole UHZ-1 Challenges Astronomers’ Previous Understanding About Quasars

Astronomers realized their idea about black holes wasn't accurate after discovering the earliest quasar after the big bang. The latest discovery made the previous scenario they had in mind untenable.

Supermassive Black Hole UHZ-1

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies grab in matter so voraciously that it gets white hot from friction and glows brilliantly enough to be visible throughout the universe, fuel quasars, among the most luminous objects in the cosmos. Quasars discovered when the universe was less than 1 billion years old have cast doubt on the theory that black holes developed within early galaxies as huge stars fell and fused.

According to Anna-Christina Eilers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they were worried that the scenario is now unworkable because of the discovery of a new black hole known as UHZ-1, which erupted when the cosmos was only 450 million years old.

Not merely the early date of UHZ-1, which had been established in a preprint published on Aug. 5. The observations reveal that the black hole's size about the galaxy around it means that it could not have grown slowly at the center of the galaxy but rather quickly through a completely other mechanism.

Using Chandra, another NASA space observatory capable of detecting the x-rays that are the most trustworthy hallmark of quasars, observers examined the region to determine whether any of those galaxy candidates included quasars. According to Princeton University team member Andy Goulding, "One object stood out" because in x-rays, "it was booming."

The accreting black hole's mass was inferred from the x-ray brightness to be around 40 million times that of the Sun. The researchers then returned to JWST to confirm that the quasar was as old as it had seemed in the initial photographs.

They established that they were viewing the quasar between 400 and 450 million years after the big bang by measuring how much particular features in its spectrum have been moved toward longer, redder wavelengths by the universe's expansion.

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More About UHZ-1

UHZ-1 was first detected as a microscopic light speck in a JWST photograph of a mega cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light-years away from Earth. JWST is NASA's newest infrared satellite observatory.

The massive cluster's gravity bends light like a big lens, amplifying farther-off objects behind it and facilitating research of them. A couple of the enlarged dots appeared to be galaxies, among the earliest ever observed, formed when the universe was less than half a billion years old.

According to Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth, it is difficult to refute that the object is a black hole since it is too large and young to be explained by the standard model. That scenario began shortly after the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as clumps of the enigmatic dark matter began to draw in primordial gases, primarily hydrogen and helium.

The gases combine to form enormous "population III" stars, which quickly burn through their fuel and collapse into black holes with masses that are only a few hundred times as massive as the Sun. The "seeds" of future supermassive black holes would be those early black holes. To expand, they would take in additional gas, combine with other seeds, and entice stars to create a galaxy around them.

Some theorists already questioned whether this sequential process could create the earliest quasars and believed that far larger seeds were required. They may have been correct, according to the same spectrum that verified UHZ-1's separation.

It enabled researchers to calculate the galaxy's mass, which at 140 million times that of the Sun, was only a small fraction of the mass of the black hole at the galaxy's center. In contrast, quasars discovered later in cosmic history have a mass of 0.1% or less dwarfed by their host galaxies.

The quasar must have gotten a head start to grow so enormous compared to its host galaxy shortly after the big bang.

According to Whalen, UHZ-1 "doesn't put the last nail in the coffin lid" of light seeds. However, this could not have been created from population III stars.