Lurking in a distant region of space, more than 13 billion light-years away, is a luminous “quasar“fed by one supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times as heavy as the sun. Astronomers have recently seen the galactic beast, marking the oldest of its kind.
The old quasar, defined as a bright, massive, remote active galactic core that radiates enormous amounts of energy, has been named J0313-1806 by an international team led by researchers at the University of Arizona. It dates back to an astonishing 670 million years after the Big Bang – when the young universe was only 5% of its current age.
That makes it the most distant – that is, the earliest – known quasar. The previous record-breaking quasar was also discovered recently, in 2017.
J0313-1806 is only 20 million light years away from its predecessor, but its supermassive black hole is twice as heavy – challenging known theories of the formation of black holes in the early universe.
The team presented its findings, which will be published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, at the virtual 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“This is the earliest evidence of how a supermassive black hole is affecting its host galaxy around it,” lead author Feige Wang said in a statement. “We know from observations of less distant galaxies that this must happen, but we have never seen it happen so early in the universe.”
NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva
Scientists believe that supermassive black holes swallow a huge amount of matter, such as gas or stars, to form an accretion disk that swirls around itself, creating a quasar. These objects are the brightest in the cosmos because of this enormous amount of energy.
The celestial body is also the first of its kind to provide evidence of an outpouring of hot, gaseous wind from the black hole at one-fifth the speed of light – a surprising discovery.
However, the formation of the quasar remains somewhat of a mystery.
Black holes usually form when a star explodes, dies, and collapses, and supermassive black holes grow when black holes merge over time. However, quasars in the early universe are far too young to have grown so big and so fast this way.
The supermassive black hole at the center of J0313-1806 is so large – it is still growing because it takes up the mass equivalent of about 25 suns per year – that it cannot be explained by some of the earlier hypotheses.
“This tells you that whatever you do, the seed of this black hole must have been formed by some other mechanism,” said study co-author Xiaohui Fan. “In this case, one in which enormous amounts of primordial, cold hydrogen gas immediately collapse into a seed black hole.”
In that scenario, instead of a star plunging into a black hole, massive amounts of cold hydrogen gas are instead responsible.
When quasars blow up their environment, they eliminate much of the cold gas needed to form stars. Therefore, scientists believe that supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies may be the reason galaxies stop forming new stars.
“We think those supermassive black holes were the reason why many of the major galaxies stopped forming stars at some point,” Fan said. “We see this ‘extinction’ at lower redshifts, but until now we did not know how early this process began in the history of the universe. This quasar is the earliest evidence that extinction may have occurred in very early times.”
J0313-1806 pumps out 200 solar masses per year. In comparison: the Milky Way forms stars at the “slow rate” of about one solar mass per year.
“This is a relatively high star formation rate, comparable to that seen in other quasars of similar age, and it tells us that the host galaxy is growing very fast,” Wang said.
“These quasars are probably still building their supermassive black holes,” added Fan. Over time, the quasar’s outflow heats up and pushes all the gas out of the galaxy, and then the black hole has nothing to eat and will stop growing. This is evidence for how these earliest massive galaxies and their quasars grow . “
The quasar offers a rare glimpse at the formation of galaxies at the beginning of the universe, but researchers need a more powerful telescope to study it further. NASAs James Webb space telescope, starting this year, will allow for a more detailed investigation.
“With ground-based telescopes, we can only see a point source,” Wang said. “Future observations could allow us to solve the quasar in more detail, show the structure of its outflow and how far the wind extends into its galaxy, and that would give us a much better idea of its evolutionary phase. “