Scientists find oldest fiery-red supermassive black hole from universe’s infancy
Supermassive black hole
An "extremely red" supermassive black hole, growing in the shadowy part of the early universe has been unearthed by scientists using theJames Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the UNCOVER programme.
The fiery red colour of the quasar-like object is due to the expansion of the universe. As the universe pushes across in all directions, light travelling towards us gets "redshifted" and that light, in this case,indicates a cloak of thick gas and dust shrouding the black hole.
Through meticulous analysis, scientists concluded that the red lightoriginated when the universe was still in its infancy, a mere 700 million years old.
Led by Lukas Furtak and Adi Zitrin of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the scientists also determined the mass of the supermassive black hole to be around 40 million times the mass of our Sun which makes itunexpectedly massive in comparison to the galaxy in which it resides.
"We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data. We were scanning the data that arrived for the UNCOVER programme, and three very compact yet red-blooming objects prominently stood out and caught our eyes," said Furtak about when they first stumbled upon the black hole.
The vast amount of radiation around the black hole caused it to take in a small-point-like appearance in JSWT data.
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"Analysis of the object's colours indicated that it was not a typical star-forming galaxy. This further supported the supermassive blackhole hypothesis," saidRachel Bezanson, the co-lead of the UNCOVER programme.
"Together with its compact size, it became evident this was likely a supermassive black hole, although it was still different from other quasars found at those early times."
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What are quasars?
Quasars are supermassive black holes, often situated at the heart of a galaxy, millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun. Quasars are super hungry as they devour any matter in the vicinity by using their immense gravitational pull.
They also emit tremendous amounts of radiation, including jets of high-energy particles,while a glowing disk of matter spins around them.
Last year, scientists published a research after monitoring over 190 quasars for two decades which stated that time passed only about a fifth as quickly as it does today due to dilation in the early universe.
The scientists compared the brightness of the 190 quasars, dating to about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event to that ofquasars existing today. In doing so, they found that certain fluctuationsthat occur in a particular amount of time today did so five times more slowly in the most ancient quasars.
(With inputs from agencies)