Giant black hole formed puzzlingly fast at dawn of cosmos

Astronomers have found by far the most distant and earliest quasar ever seen, a cosmic beacon shining so soon after the big bang that standard theory can’t explain how it was built. Among the most luminous objects in the cosmos, quasars are powered by supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, which suck in matter so voraciously that it becomes white hot from friction and glows brightly enough to be seen across the universe. Astronomers thought the black holes formed stepwise within early galaxies, as giant stars collapsed and merged, but quasars detected from when the universe was less than 1 billion years old have challenged the idea. “We were already concerned,” says Anna-Christina Eilers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The new one, dubbed UHZ-1, which blazed when the universe was less than 450 million years old, has made that scenario untenable. It’s not just UHZ-1’s early date, confirmed in a preprint posted on 5 August. The observations show its black hole is so large compared with the galaxy around it that it can’t have evolved slowly at the galaxy’s heart, but must have formed rapidly, by an entirely different process. UHZ-1 was first seen as a tiny speck of light in an image made by JWST, NASA’s new infrared space telescope, of a megacluster of galaxies residing 4 billion light-years from Earth. The gravity of the giant cluster bends light like a giant lens, magnifying more distant objects behind it and making ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news