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Updated: February 28, 2024 00:08 IST
Tel Aviv (Israel), February 28 (ANI/TPS): Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Israeli astronomers have identified an extraordinarily red supermassive black hole enveloped in cosmic dust, challenging current knowledge about the growth of black holes and their relationship with host galaxies. .
The Webb Telescope is a space observatory that orbits approximately 1.5 million kilometers above Earth, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the most distant objects in the universe and never-before-seen phenomena.
By analyzing images taken by the Webb telescope, a team of astronomers led by Dr. Lukas Furtak and Prof. Adi Zitrin of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev revealed what at first appeared to be a lensed, quasar-like object. , from the primitive universe. Quasars are incredibly bright and distant objects observed at the centers of galaxies.
“Three very compact but red objects stood out and caught our attention,” said Furtak, lead author of the discovery papers. “Its ‘red dot’ appearance immediately led us to suspect that it was a quasar-like object.”
However, this black hole was actively accreting material, referring to the process by which matter falls and accumulates around a black hole due to its intense gravitational pull. This matter can come from various sources, such as gas clouds, stars, or even other black holes.
Zitrin said: “We used a numerical lensing model we had built for the galaxy cluster to determine that the three red dots had to be multiple images of the same background source, seen when the Universe was only about 700 million years old.”
The Ben-Gurion researchers were working within the framework of the Webb Telescope’s UNCOVER program, which studies the universe. With input from other UNCOVER researchers in the US and Australia, “we were able to not only confirm that the red compact object was a supermassive black hole and measure its exact redshift, but also obtain a solid estimate of its mass from lines,” Furtak said.
“The gas orbits in the black hole’s gravitational field and reaches very high speeds not seen elsewhere in galaxies. Due to Doppler shift, the light emitted by the accreting material is redshifted on one side and redshifted. blue on the other, depending on its speed, which causes the emission lines in the spectrum to broaden,” he explained.
According to the researchers, the colors suggest that the black hole is behind a thick veil of dust that obscures much of its light. The team managed to measure the mass of the black hole and found that it was significantly more massive, compared to its host galaxy, than had been seen in more local examples.
The findings, recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, raise new questions.
In particular, the mass of the black hole exceeds that of its host galaxy by a significant amount.
“All the light from that galaxy must fit within a small region the size of a current star cluster. Gravitational lensing of the source gave us exquisite limits on the size. Even packing all the possible stars into such a region small, the black hole ends up being at least one percent of the system’s total mass,” said Princeton University professor Jenny Greene, one of the study’s co-authors.
“In fact, several other supermassive black holes in the early universe have been found to exhibit similar behavior, leading to some intriguing insights into the growth of black holes and their host galaxies, and the interaction between them, that are not is well understood.” she added.
Zitrin said: “In some ways, it’s the astrophysical equivalent of the chicken-and-egg problem. We currently don’t know which came first: the galaxy or the black hole, how massive the first black holes were and how they grew.” (ANI/TPS)