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Formed in the early ages of the universe: The best-fed black hole!

byadmin
November 6, 2024

Astronomers examining data from the US Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered a supermassive black hole that dated back 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang and consumed 40 times the theoretical limit of matter. Scientists stated that this discovery provides important clues about how black holes formed in the early periods of the universe.

Astronomers examined data from the US Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Scientists who examined the data discovered a supermassive black hole that is consuming 40 times the theoretical limit of matter at the center of a galaxy, dating back 1.5 billion years after the “Big Bang”.
According to the news in Science Daily magazine, the black hole called LID-568 was detected by the team led by Hyewon Suh, an astronomer at the International Gemini Observatory and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab. Astronomers have found that the short-lived LID-568 is consuming matter at an extraordinary rate, more than 40 times the theoretical limit, just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The study stated that LID-568’s “feast” provides clues about how supermassive black holes formed in the early universe.
The team used JWST data to examine in detail a galaxy island obtained from the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s survey of 4,016 X-ray sources. The faint infrared light of the galaxy in question, which emits very bright X-rays, was captured by JWST’s sensitive infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec). The team, examining the NIRSpec data, observed very high brightness and unexpectedly strong gas outflows around the central black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to conclude that LID-568’s mass growth must have occurred in a single period of rapid accretion. Judging from its luminosity, Suh and his team discovered that LID-568 was feeding on matter at a rate 40 times greater than the Eddington Limit, which is the maximum luminosity of a black hole, as well as the mass limit at which the outward pressure created by the temperature and the maximum amount of matter the black hole can swallow remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into theories, which have so far lacked observational confirmation, that supermassive black holes form from small black hole “seeds” that formed either as a result of the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or as gas clouds collapsed (heavy seeds). “The discovery of a super-Eddington accretion black hole suggests that, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a ‘light or heavy seed,’ a significant portion of its mass growth may occur during a single period of rapid feeding,” Suh ​​said.
Julia Scharwachter, one of the co-authors of the study, said, “This extraordinary situation shows that the rapid feeding mechanism above the Eddington Limit is one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the universe.” With this discovery, astronomers evaluate that the Eddington Limit can be exceeded and that the powerful gas outflows observed in LID-568 act as a release valve for the high energy produced by excessive accretion, preventing the system from becoming unstable. The research was published in the journal “Nature Astronomy”.
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