Napping after overeating is a dilemma that many of us will be lucky to encounter on Christmas Day. New research has shown that billions of years ago, some of them were early Black holes He also had to take a nap after overeating.
using James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)astronomers discovered inert Supermassive black hole Which existed only 800 million years ago Big bang. This cosmic monster lost consciousness after eating a large meal of gas and galactic dust.
The black hole is unusual for its enormous size. With a mass of about 400 million times the mass of the Sun, it is the most massive black hole seen by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe. The discovery was published on December 18 in the journal natureThis further complicates the mystery of how supermassive black holes acquired such a large mass so quickly in the early universe.
The mass of this supermassive black hole also stands out because when these cosmic giants are typically found in the local (and modern) universe, they have about 0.1% of the mass of their host galaxy. This massive black hole has a mass equivalent to about 40% of the mass of its host galaxy.
Scientists expect such a giant black hole to feed, and thus grow. However, this black hole is devouring gas at a very slow rate, about one-hundredth of the maximum possible accretion for a black hole of this size.
Because black holes have outer boundaries called “Event prospects“Which traps light (and everything else that passes through it), if it is not greedily feeding and illuminating this substance, it tends to be invisible.
When it is surrounded by matter in a flat cloud it is called Accumulation disk Gradually feeding them, the gravitational influence of supermassive black holes causes enormous friction, causing this cosmic storehouse to glow. This emission allows us to detect supermassive black holes.
However, this inert black hole was different. This is because its enormous mass gave it a huge gravitational effect that made it visible.
“Although this black hole is inert, its enormous size enabled us to discover it,” said team leader Ignace Godpalis of the Kavli Institute of Cosmology in Cambridge. In a statement. “Its dormant state allowed us to identify the mass of the host galaxy as well.
“The early universe managed to produce some absolute monsters, even in relatively small galaxies.”
Why are early monster black holes such a big problem?
Since the James Webb Space Telescope began observing the universe in 2022, the powerful instrument has discovered supermassive black holes in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes are cosmic titans with masses equivalent to millions or even billions of suns. Unlike stellar-mass black holes, which form when massive stars collapse, super-massive black holes are thought to grow through a series of later, more massive black hole mergers and from a steady diet of gas and dust from their host galaxies.
This process is believed to take more than a billion years to create a supermassive black hole with a mass even on the lowest level of these supermassive masses. This means that discovering a supermassive black hole in the recent history of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe is not a problem.
However, finding these cosmic giants with the James Webb Space Telescope when the universe was younger than a billion years old, sometimes 600 million years after the Big Bang, poses a problem. The enormous size of this early black hole and the fact that it does not grow rapidly by feeding makes this problem even more vexing.
“It is possible that black holes were born large, which could explain why the James Webb Space Telescope detected massive black holes in the early universe,” said Roberto Maiolino, a team member and Kavli researcher. “But another possibility is that they go through periods of hyperactivity, followed by long periods of dormancy.”
Black holes push it beyond the maximum overfeeding limit
Maiolino and his colleagues have revisited the problem of massive black holes in the early universe by performing simulations of their growth mechanisms. The team found that the most likely explanation is that black holes can briefly exceed the accretion limit.
This feed cap is known as “Eddington limit“It suggests that any celestial body accumulating insatiably would reach the point at which the radiation pumped out by its feeding would push materials away, cutting off its food supply.
This team believes that early black holes may have experienced waves of overfeeding, or “Eddington superaccumulationDuring these periods, greedy black holes grow at extremely accelerated rates. This continues for 5 to 10 million years, after which the black hole “falls asleep” for 100 million years.
“It seems counterintuitive to explain a dormant black hole with periods of hyperactivity, but these short bursts allow it to grow rapidly while it spends most of its time napping,” Maiolino said.
The dormant period of these black holes lasts 10 to 20 times longer than the Eddington superaccretion phase, which means astronomers are more likely to catch these cosmic giants during their nap time than at dinner time.
The discovery of this giant black hole is a breakthrough in this theory.
This monster early black hole may be just the tip of the iceberg, as the team suspects that the early universe could have been full of these sleeping giants. Unfortunately, the dormant nature of these monsters will make it difficult for astronomers to detect them.
“It’s likely that the vast majority of black holes that exist are in this inactive state — I’m surprised that we found this, but I’m excited to think that there are a lot more black holes that we can find,” Maiolino concluded.
Originally published on Space.com website.
