{"id":201049,"date":"2023-07-12T07:15:42","date_gmt":"2023-07-12T11:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=201049"},"modified":"2023-07-11T10:48:06","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T14:48:06","slug":"hidden-little-monsters-researchers-find-the-most-distant-active-black-holes-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2023\/07\/hidden-little-monsters-researchers-find-the-most-distant-active-black-holes-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Hidden Little Monsters:’ Researchers Find the Most Distant, Active Black Holes Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since its launch just over a year and a half ago<\/a>, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)<\/a> has enabled researchers to peer deeper into space, with greater clarity than ever before. Now, astronomers from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey<\/a> led by Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin, including UConn Department of Physics associate professor Jonathan Trump,<\/a> have found supermassive black holes in several of the earliest, most distant galaxies. The team has released these findings in several initial papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The galaxy named CEERS 1019 developed around 570 million years after the Big Bang and contains a surprisingly massive black hole. The pre-print detailing this discovery can be found here<\/a>. Totaling around nine million times more massive than our galaxy\u2019s sun, CEERS 1019\u2019s black hole is much more massive than expected for living in a very young galaxy in the early universe. What\u2019s more, the black hole is still actively accreting \u2013 or accumulating \u2013 surrounding matter, likely on its way to growing into one of the largest black holes observed in the universe today, one billion times larger than our sun. Trump and the CEERS team spotted the black hole through the high-velocity gas associated with the accretion of matter outside the black hole\u2019s event horizon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that all galaxies today – including our own Milky Way – have a supermassive black hole in their center,\u201d says Trump. \u201cBut there\u2019s an outstanding mystery of how these supermassive black holes first form in the early Universe. I think of it as a ‘chicken-or-egg’ problem of which comes first, the black hole or the galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n

CEERS 1019\u2019s black hole is difficult to explain, Trump explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cThese new black hole discoveries are surprising because the black holes are bigger than expected for the early universe. There\u2019s a fundamental limit to how quickly black holes can accrete matter before their associated energy output blows the material back out. These black holes probably needed to form via a somewhat exotic \u2018direct-collapse\u2019 scenario in which gas in the early universe collapses straight down into a black hole rather than forming stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

The JWST is supplying the researchers with massive amounts of data to comb through, and they quickly identified two additional supermassive black holes in young galaxies in the distant and early universe, detailed in another pre-print that can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With these three “little monsters” practically leaping out of the early JWST observations, the researchers suspect there are many more out there to find.<\/p>\n