A quasar from the early universe confirms the theory of the formation of the SMBH

The rapid formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe continues to baffle astronomers, and new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have only added to the mystery; it even challenges existing models of cosmic evolution.

Equipped with the Advanced Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) allows scientists to delve deeper into the early universe than any other telescope of its kind; especially capturing data from the quasar J1120+0641.

Observed less than 760 million years after the Big Bang, this quasar is one of the first ever observed and offers a crucial insight into the conditions of the nascent cosmos. A quasar, one of the brightest objects in the universe, is powered by an actively feeding supermassive black hole (SMBH), which is usually found at the center of galaxies.

These SMBHs create glowing accretion disks around them as they pull in gas and even entire star systems. The intense radiation from these disks can expel material from the host galaxy in massive “relativistic” jets, a phenomenon that can be observed in later cosmic epochs. The discovery of such a quasar in the early universe suggests that SMBHs were not only present very soon after the Big Bang, but also well integrated into their host galaxies soon after their formation.

Dr. Sarah Bosman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), led the analysis of J1120+0641’s spectrum in a new study published this week in the journal. Astronomy of nature.

Her findings reveal that the characteristics of this early quasar are strikingly similar to those of more recent quasars that are closer in time to us – meaning that the earliest quasars looked remarkably like modern ones, a finding that challenges many theories about the earliest years of the universe. existence.

“Overall, these new observations only add to the mystery,” Bosman said in the MPIA statement, “early quasars were shockingly normal. No matter at which wavelengths we observe them, quasars are almost identical in all epochs of the universe.

“Unexpected” normality in the first billion years of the universe’s life

The study highlights a significant challenge to existing theories of black hole growth in the early universe. Traditional models suggest that SMBHs gradually accumulate mass by accreting gas or merging with other black holes. However, the rapid formation of SMBHs in the early universe implies an alternative formation process that is still unexplained.

Critically, the dust torus surrounding J1120+0641 is similar to those found in later quasars, challenging one major theory of early SMBH formation. The JWST observations essentially disprove the idea that early SMBHs reached their enormous sizes through an “ultra-efficient feeding regime”; basically that there was some special mechanism in the early universe that allowed these black holes to pile much more mass into it than the radiation from its accretion disk pushed away.

Because the accretion disk of J1120+0641 is actually the same as many other accretion disks around recently formed quasars, there simply wasn’t enough material around it to slowly grow over many billions of years into the SMBH we see today.

Additionally, the quasar accretion disk shows no evidence of excessive dust that could bias mass estimates, strengthening the conclusion that early SMBHs were inherently massive from the start.

A possible theory of how these early SMBHs formed is that they started with significant initial masses, potentially from the collapse of giant gas clouds in the early universe.

Clouds of gas usually collapse into stars in the “modern” universe, but in the early universe there may have been so much material available (many orders of magnitude larger than the gas cloud from which our Sun formed) that instead of coalescing into stars today these collapsing clouds of gas passed completely around the stars and collapsed into the SMBH.

The findings underscore the mysterious nature of the early universe. While JWST’s capabilities have provided unprecedented insights, they have also raised new questions about the origin and rapid growth of the SMBH. As astronomers continue to explore the universe with advanced instruments, the quest to unravel the mysteries of the early formation of black holes remains central to understanding the evolution of the universe.