It turns out that the first supermassive black holes were not so supermassifs, the research suggests

All the galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their center. A new discovery does not contradict this observation, but it suggests that we overestimated how heavy some of these black holes are.

Astrophysicists using the very large telescope (VLT) in Chile found proof that the black hole in an infantile galaxy was ten times smaller than what the theoretical models predicts. If they can find similar behavior in other galaxies, this would mean that we are even more blind to the dynamics of the early universe than we think. The study, to be published in the magazine Astronomy and Astrophysics, is currently available in pre -printed on Arxiv.

“We have been wondering for years how it is possible that we have discovered all these supermassive black holes entirely cultivated in very young galaxies shortly after the Big Bang,” said Seb Hoenig, co-author of the study and astronomer at the University of Southampton, in a press release. “Our results suggest that the methods to weigh these black holes used before do not simply work reliably in the early universe.”

A gas veil

For the study, the researchers trained the VLT on an extremely bright and distant quasar, which probably formed in the first days of the universe. Recent technological advances allowed the team to obtain a remarkably clear image of how the gravitational attraction of the black hole shaped the nearby affair.

The researchers were surprised by the quantity of thick and dusty gas swirling around the black hole, which sucked the gas at an amazing rate. This simultaneously created an extreme gas exit from the black hole, they reported in the paper. In fact, around 80% of the gas around the black hole was flowing, and not, according to the co-author of the Taro Shimizu study, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial physics in Germany, in a related version.

For an unconscious observer, it could reveal the black hole that it is greater than it is really, said Hoenig. “Think like a cosmic hair dryer set to a maximum power: intense radiation around it blows everything that approaches its approach.”

As if to prove Hoenig’s point, a more in -depth examination of the data revealed that the supermassive black hole was about 800 million times the mass of our sun – always gigantic, but about 10 times smaller than theoretical predictions.

The alleged unusual universe

Astronomy has made great progress in understanding the dynamics of our universe, but there are still many unanswered questions. A good part of these questions concern the state of the very first days of our universe.

The implications of the new discovery are a new piece of the puzzle and a reminder of how much there is to find.

“If our results are typical, this means that the masses of black hole in the early universe may have been systematically overestimated,” said Hoenig. “This could lead to a reassessment of our cosmic evolution models.”