What do you think the universe was like a few hundred million years following the Big Bang? Doesn’t it blow your mind just a bit that we’re living in a universe that actually is 13.8 billion years old? Thanks to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, though, we’re getting a view into this ancient time and what we’re getting a view of, well, pretty much perplexes people.
One of the most fascinating cosmic mysteries is that of a black hole residing at the center of some distant galaxy, called J1120+0641. Consider this: only 770 million years after the Big Bang, and this black hole had turned gigantic in mass a billion times that of our sun. Now, that is like a newborn lifting a hundred-pound weight—simply mind-boggling.
How then can such a huge black hole have formed within such a very short time? Well, this is a question astronomers would wish so much to have its answer. J1120+0641 was discovered initially in 2011, but the mysteries of it were only unraveled recently due to enhanced observation by JWST.
It’s surrounded by a blazing beacon called a quasar, which may be the most luminous of all objects in the universe. Full size Quasars light up when gas and dust fall into the black hole, creating a glowing accretion disk. Energy emitted is enormous and might outshine whole galaxies. These early quasars have been something of a cosmic puzzle because they show up fully formed in these first billion years of the universe.
Initial theories had scientists thinking that maybe these first black holes were way more efficient eaters, but new evidence is showing the eating patterns of old and new black holes are quite similar. The idea that immediately appears from the conclusions of this paper is that, necessarily, the accretion structures of J1120+0641 must have come together very rapidly—as they seem fully ‘mature’ less than 760 Myr after the Big Bang, concludes the paper in Nature Astronomy. It was JWST they turned to for closer views—and what they found was both exhilarating and infuriating.
They found that the huge, swirling, doughnut-shaped cloud of dust surrounding this ancient black hole was similar to others we see today, and so these black holes could not have been superfast by being more efficient eaters. There wasn’t extra dust hanging around the black hole that could have tricked scientists into overestimating its mass.
A good summary of the findings has been provided by Dr. Sarah Bosman, post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: “Overall, the new observations only add to the mystery: Early quasars were shockingly normal. No matter in which wavelengths we observe them, quasars are nearly identical at all epochs of the Universe.”
So, if these ancient black holes are just like today’s but far more massive, what gives? One such theory was that temporary boosts could have inflated the growth of these black holes beyond what’s called the Eddington limit. That’s the point at which radiation from a black hole’s accretion disk is so strong it pushes away more material than it pulls in. But even this repetitive dance ends up being balanced in an extremely cosmic way. Even this didn’t really explain such extreme sizes.
One such theory is that they began as “heavy seeds,” already enormous right after they formed. And that would have them born in colossal clouds of gas collapsing directly into black holes, somehow bypassing the normal star-collapse pathway. The idea remains highly controversial—scientists are working feverishly to find evidence for it.
Surprise: Black holes are not only those things that mesmerize people across faraway galaxies; researchers at earth are also getting closer to understanding them. For instance, a group of scientists from the Netherlands was able to simulate a makeshift laboratory replica of a black hole using an atom chain. They found that their simulation effectively returned a recreation of hypothetical radiation called Hawking radiation, named after famous physicist Stephen Hawking.
The researchers found that, inside the lab, this makeshift black hole began to glow after part of a chain had extended beyond what is called the event horizon—that point at which not even light can escape a black hole’s gravitational pull. That glow may help bridge the gap between two fundamentally opposing theories: the theory of relativity put forward by Einstein and quantum mechanics. This will open up an avenue to the exploration of basic quantum-mechanical aspects together with gravity and curved spacetimes within various condensed matter settings,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
So what does this all mean for our view of the universe? At worst, it shows that despite technological advancement and brilliant minds, there’s still so much we don’t know. JWST peels back the layers of cosmic history where new discoveries are rows of the puzzle. Sometimes they fit perfectly, and some other times, hit us out of the blue.
The mystery of these early, giant black holes may remain unsolved for now, yet it is precisely this which makes science so excited: one question yields to the next, and the process of discovery never dies.
