Astronomers have discovered the most
distant black hole yet seen in X-rays, using NASA telescopes. The black hole is
at an early stage of growth that had never been witnessed before, where its
mass is similar to that of its host galaxy.
This result may explain how some of the
first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.
By combining data from NASA’s Chandra
X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers
was able to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole just 470
million years after the big bang.
Astronomers found the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays (in a galaxy dubbed UHZ1) using the Chandra and Webb space telescopes. X-ray emission is a telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole. This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. These images show the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 that UHZ1 is located behind, in X-rays from Chandra and infrared data from Webb, as well as close-ups of the black hole host galaxy UHZ1.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared:
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand
“We needed Webb to find this
remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,”
said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
(CfA) who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these
results. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the
amount of light we detected.” This magnifying effect is known as gravitational
lensing.
Bogdan and his team found the black
hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744,
located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, has revealed
the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years
from Earth, when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
Then over two weeks of observations
with Chandra showed the presence of intense, superheated, X-ray emitting gas in
this galaxy – a trademark for a growing supermassive black hole. The light from
the galaxy and the X-rays from gas around its supermassive black hole are
magnified by about a factor of four by intervening matter in Abell 2744 (due to
gravitational lensing), enhancing the infrared signal detected by Webb and
allowing Chandra to detect the faint X-ray source.
This discovery is important for
understanding how some supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses soon
after the big bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds
of gas, creating black holes weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns? Or
do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes
weighing only between about 10 and 100 Suns?
“There are physical limits on how
quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more
massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time
to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed”, said Andy
Goulding of Princeton University. Goulding is a co-author of the Nature
Astronomy paper and lead author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal
Letters that reports the galaxy’s distance and mass using a spectrum from Webb.
Bogdan’s team has found strong
evidence that the newly discovered black hole was born massive. Its mass is
estimated to fall between 10 and 100 million Suns, based on the brightness and
energy of the X-rays. This mass range is similar to that of all the stars in
the galaxy where it lives, which is in stark contrast to black holes in the
centers of galaxies in the nearby universe that usually contain only about a
tenth of a percent of the mass of their host galaxy’s stars.
The large mass of the black hole at
a young age, plus the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the
galaxy detected by Webb, all agree with theoretical predictions in 2017 by
co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University for an “Outsize Black Hole”
that directly formed from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.
“We think that this is the first
detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that
some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” said Natarajan. “For the
first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs
about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”
The researchers plan to use this
and other results pouring in from Webb and those combining data from other
telescopes to fill out a larger picture of the early universe.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope
previously showed that light from distant galaxies is highly magnified by
matter in the intervening galaxy cluster, providing part of the motivation for
the Webb and Chandra observations described here.
The paper describing the results by
Bogdan’s team appears in Nature Astronomy, and a preprint is available online.
The Webb data used in both papers
is part of a survey called the Ultradeep Nirspec and nirCam ObserVations before
the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER). The paper led by UNCOVER team member Andy
Goulding appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The co-authors include other UNCOVER team members,
plus Bogdan and Natarajan. A detailed interpretation paper that compares
observed properties of UHZ1 with theoretical models for Outsize Black Hole
Galaxies is forthcoming.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s
Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is
the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our
solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing
the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb
is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space
Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
Read
more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/chandra-x-ray-observatory/
Source: NASA
Telescopes Discover Record-Breaking Black Hole - NASA
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