The oldest, longest, clearest: astronauts discover heavy cosmic pressures

Lying at the center of every huge galaxy is a monster – a black hole with a mass equal to millions or even billions of times heavier than the sun. Astronomers do not fully understand how these things came to be, although they have ideas. These ideas range from the incredible potential that they evolved from smaller black hole crashes, to the much more likely, but still mysterious, possibility that they grew directly from short-lived gas clouds. after the universe began. To prove the truth, astronomers must study black holes extremely shortly after the universe began. And, at the January 2021 annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of America, researchers announced that the farthest (and therefore oldest) giant black hole has been discovered to date.

It is very difficult to see a black hole. In fact, it was accomplished just once, with the observation of a man at the center of a galaxy 65 million light-years from Earth. However, there is a way to see a black hole indirectly, and that is when a case falls into it. As a case (usually in the form of a gas) falls into a black hole, the gas is heated by friction. The temperature of this gas is high enough for it to glow. And it only shines a little. Light emitted by a large “feeding” black hole is bright enough to be seen over billions of light years. Historically, nutrient-dense black holes have been known as “quasar,” but more recently they have been referred to as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs.

The recently discovered quasar is the farthest found to date. Called J0313-1806, it is located so far away that it took three billion billion years for light to travel to Earth. We see it as it was just 670 million years after the universe began.

The mass in the black hole that powers the quasar is 1.6 billion times heavier than our sun. In contrast, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is just four million times larger than the sun.

J0313-1806 is ten trillion times brighter than our sun, meaning it emits a thousand times more energy than the entire Milky Way galaxy. It is this brightness that allows it to be seen at such great distances.

Extremely black holes like J0313-1806, and the galleries that host them, are very important to researchers trying to understand how the universe evolved. It is thought that the first stars began to shine about 200 million years after the Big Bang, and private galaxies were established about 400 million years after the universe began. Explaining the existence of a supermassive black hole at an early date just 670 million years after the Big Bang is a real challenge for astronauts.

He had to deploy several resources to find out that J0313-1806 is an early quasar, including the Victor M. Blanco Telescope and the Gemini South telescope, based in Chile , along with the North Gemini Telescope and WM Keck Observatory, located on top of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.

As well as determining the size of the enormous black hole, astronomers also saw a jet of gas emanating from it. This jet is moving at an incredible speed of 20% of the speed of light, fast enough to orbit the Earth in half a second. It may seem unlikely that a black hole will disperse material, but as spirals go down into the black hole and heat up, powerful magnetic fields are created that direct some of the case to the poles of the black hole and this matter is exploded into place.

This jet of hot gas disturbs the environment of the host galaxy, causing star formation. Astronomers estimate that the star formation rate in the galaxy hosting J0313-1806 is about two hundred times higher than in the Milky Way. Researchers can use this galaxy as a laboratory to study the formation of early stars in the universe.

Scientists will continue to study both J0313-1806 and the host galaxy to better understand a crucial moment in the history of the universe.