Astronomers stunned after James Webb Space Telescope discovers the earliest pair of black hole-powered quasars
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered the oldest pair of supermassive black hole-powered quasars ever seen.
Key points
- Finally, at such great distances and with such a small separation between the two supermassive black holes, the individual members of a quasar pair are hard to individually resolve.
- Yet, since it began operations in 2022, the JWST has been routinely discovering supermassive black holes powering quasars as early as 400 million years after the Big Bang.
- "There is no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early in the age of our universe, much less two," research team leader Silvia Onorato of the NOIRLab said in a statement.
That makes Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua the most compact quasar pair found during a period of the universe's history known as Cosmic Dawn, shortly after the birth of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes.
The immense gravity of the central black hole causes friction, heating the accretion disk and causing it to glow, often brighter than the combined light of every star in the surrounding galaxy.
Additional details
- Sometimes at distances and times that they would probably rather not, because it challenges everything we know about black hole growth.
- There is just 18,100 light-years, or roughly one-fifth the diameter of the Milky Way, between the supermassive black holes, which have masses of 1.5 billion and 400 million times that of the sun.
- That is because, according to current models, black holes should need at least 1 billion years to feed and merge enough to reach masses millions or billions of times that of the sun.
- Using JWST’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph Integral Field Unit) instrument, the survey has uncovered 200 quasars, just under half of all currently known early universe quasars.
- Firstly, the "quasar phase" of a supermassive black hole is relatively short on cosmic terms.
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