Astronomers discover the first black hole never confirmed

An international team of astronomers identified the first black hole never confirmed, a former giant who only existed 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery could offer new clues to a mysterious class of ancient galaxies which confused the dominant theories of cosmology.

In a new article published in the magazine Astrophysics Letters, the researchers describe Capers-Lrd-Z9-a distant galaxy in gas in a supermassive black hole in its center. It dates back approximately 13.3 billion years, a point where the universe was only 3% of its current age. Spotted by the James Webb space telescope, Capers-LRD-Z9 is one of the many “Little Red Dot” galaxies-these strange bodies began to appear in webb imagery during the first year of the telescope mission.

“The discovery of small red points was a major surprise of the first JWST data, because they were not like galaxies seen with the Hubble space telescope,” said Steven Finkelstein, co-author of the new study and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas in Austin, in a press release. “Now we are understanding what they have and how they have become.”

Small red dots galaxies are named for their scarlet writing appearance in webb images, and no webb front telescope had the sensitivity or resolution to detect such distant objects, which is why nobody had already seen them before. Their discovery threw in question of the ideas of consensus on our universe: if these objects were stars, their strong light emissions would imply that certain galaxies had become so large and so quickly that the theory which prevails could not explain them, according to NASA.

Finkelstein and his colleagues have compiled one of the greatest samples of red -dots galaxies to date, which existed almost all in the 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. This study, published in January, revealed that a large number of these objects probably contained increasing supermassive black holes. The discovery offered an alternative explanation to the amount of light that the galaxies emit, but they needed more evidence to support their theory.

So, Finkelstein and a team led by Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center who also worked on research published in January, during the spectroscopy data of the Caper (Candels-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey) program. Spectroscopy measures different light wavelengths to reveal details on the characteristics of an object.

When the black holes interact with the surrounding gas clouds, it produces a distinct spectroscopic signature: while the gas swirls quickly and falls into a black hole, the light of the gas which moves away from us in redest wavelengths, while the light of the gas which moves towards us in the blue wavelengths.

“There are not many other things that create this signature,” said Taylor, and Capers-Lrd-Z9 A. The discovery marks the first time that astronomers have found this spectroscopic signature associated with a small red dots galaxy, according to the team, indicating that the black holes supermassifs are the likely source of their unexplained brightness. The work could also help explain what makes these galaxies so red: if the light passes through a thick gas cloud around a supermassive black hole, it would stretch in redest wavelengths.

“We have seen these clouds in other galaxies,” said Taylor. “When we compared this object to these other sources, it was a dead ringtone.”

The discovery could also offer new ideas on the evolution of black holes. Taylor and his colleagues believe that the black hole in the center of this galaxy is enormous – up to 300 million times more massive than the sun. Finding a black hole of this size that existed so early in the universe “adds to growing evidence that the first black holes became much faster than possible,” said Finkelstein. “Or they started much more massive than our models predict it.”