What To Know
- Astronomers have identified supermassive black holes, which weigh millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, in most of the large galaxies in the local Universe, including our own Milky Way.
- The latest observations of the observatory have in fact revealed the ongoing fusion of two galaxies, as well as their immense black holes at a time when the universe was only 740 million years old.
- ” We can try to imagine how the evolution of merging galaxies might be affected if every galaxy had a supermassive black hole as big or bigger than the one we have in the Milky Way.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have spotted a pair of colliding black holes at a record distance, more than thirteen billion light-years away, or about 740 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the early Universe and raises new questions about its evolution.
Two monstrous black holes merging at the dawn of time
Astronomers have identified supermassive black holes, which weigh millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, in most of the large galaxies in the local Universe, including our own Milky Way. These cosmic monsters likely played a crucial role in the evolution of the galaxies that house them. Yet how these objects grew to such proportions remains largely a mystery. The discovery of colossal black holes already present in the Universe less than a billion years after the Big Bang suggests at least one thing: their growth was rapid. The James Webb Space Telescope testifies once again to this incredible precocity. The latest observations of the observatory have in fact revealed the ongoing fusion of two galaxies, as well as their immense black holes at a time when the universe was only 740 million years old. This system is referred to as ZS7.
About 50 million suns
Massive black holes that are actively gobbling up matter have unique spectrographic characteristics that allow astronomers to distinguish them. For galaxies at such distant distances, like the ones studied in this observation, these signatures are inaccessible from Earth and can only be observed with the Webb Space Telescope. The team identified that one of the two black holes weighed 50 million times the mass of the Sun. The mass of the second black hole is probably similarbut according to researchers, its assessment is much more complex, because it is buried in a dense gas cloud.
These images show the location of the ZS7 galaxy system as seen through the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, J. Dunlop, D. Magee, PG Pérez-González, H. Übler, R. Maiolino, et al. Still, these results suggest that the merger is an important route by which black holes can grow rapidly, even at the cosmic dawn. The stellar mass of the system we studied is similar to that of our neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.“, explains Pablo G. Pérez-González, a member of the team at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC/INTA, in Spain. ” We can try to imagine how the evolution of merging galaxies might be affected if every galaxy had a supermassive black hole as big or bigger than the one we have in the Milky Way.“. The team also points out that once the two black holes merge, they will produce gravitational waves. These events will be able to be detected using the next generation of dedicated observatories, such as the LISA laser interferometer space missionrecently approved by the European Space Agency. Details of the study are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
