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Madrid (New Diary) – With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, astrophysicists from several countries of the world have succeeded in “peeking” into one of the largest and most distant black holes on Earth, located about 13 billion light-years away, when the Universe was “only” about 800 million years old.
The results of the research work, in which several astrophysicists from the Astrobiology Center (CAB), part of the Spanish Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space Technology (INTA), played a major role, were published this Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The most “surprising” thing for the researchers was the confirmation that this distant and massive black hole is “fed” in the same way as the nearest and closest black holes in the universe, CAB said in a report published on Monday.
Astrophysicists have been trying for years to explain how black holes acquired their extraordinary masses at the dawn of the universe, and new results from observations with the James Webb Space Telescope now rule out an “exotic” mechanism that had been proposed as a possible solution to these problems.
“Cosmic Dawn”
Because the first billion years of the universe’s history—the so-called “cosmic dawn”—posed a challenge for science to uncover how the first black holes grew so massive in such an accelerated manner, given the astonishingly large masses of the black hole galaxies known to exist at the centers of the universe.
In the 13.8 billion years since the universe was born, stars and galaxies have changed dramatically, with galaxies growing and gaining more mass, either because they consume the gas around them or, occasionally, because they merge with each other.
That’s why astronomers observing quasars (extremely bright and distant galaxies in our own solar system) over the past two decades have discovered some very young black holes that are nonetheless enormous in mass, up to 10 billion solar masses.
CAB explains that it takes time for light to travel from a distant object, so “observing” a distant object means looking into the distant past and seeing the most distant known quasars as they were during the “cosmic dawn,” which was located about a billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies formed.
Spanish Science and Technology
To date, researchers have offered many explanations to try to explain how the first black hole grew so massive so quickly, and while no scientific reasoning has been fully accepted, the instruments aboard James Webb, including the MIRI mid-infrared instrument, have made these studies possible with a “giant leap forward.”
The instrument was built by an international consortium of scientists and engineers from the Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), who received a certain amount of observing time in exchange for building the instrument.
In 2019, a few years before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (a project of international cooperation between ESA, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency), the international consortium has decided to use part of this time to observe the most distant quasar known at the time, an object labeled “J1120+0641.”
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