An international team of astronomers, including the Spanish Mar Mezcua, has discovered LID-568, a supermassive black hole that feeds on matter at an extreme rate, 40 times higher than the theoretical limit, and is in the early universe, only 1.5 billion away. of years of the Big Bang.
Supermassive black holes are concentrations of matter with a gravitational force so intense that not even light can escape. They are usually found in the centers of galaxies, in whose formation and evolution they play a key role.
Specifically, the researchers used the integral field spectrograph of James Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, which allows them to obtain a complete view of their target and the surrounding region, which led to the unexpected discovery of powerful gas flows around the central black hole.
The speed and size of these flows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of LID-568’s mass growth could have occurred in a single episode of rapid creation.
“The discovery would have been impossible without this James Webb instrument. Thanks to it we will be able to improve our understanding of black holes and open interesting avenues of research,” says Hyewon Suh, a researcher at the Gemini International Observatory/NOIRLab in the United States, who has led the work.
Scientist Mar Mezcua, from the Institute of Space Sciences and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (ICE-CSIC, IEEC), has also been part of them.
Researchers have seen that LID-568 appears to feed on matter at a speed 40 times higher than the theoretical limit or Eddington limit, which refers to the maximum luminosity that a black hole can reach, as well as the speed at which it can absorb subject.
When the luminosity of LID-568 was calculated to be much greater than theoretically possible, astronomers knew their data contained something extraordinary: “Most of the black holes in the early universe detected by James Webb are very faint (or not at all). detectable) in X-rays, but LID-569 caught our attention due to its high brightness in X-rays,” Mezcua emphasizes. .
“A fast feeding mechanism above the Eddington limit may be one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the Universe,” says another of the authors, Julia Scharwächter, astronomer at the International Gemini Observatory. NSF NOIRLab.
The results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from “seeds” of smaller black holes, which, according to current theories, arise from the death of the first stars in the Universe (light seeds) or from the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds).
But until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
“The discovery of an Eddington superaccumulator black hole suggests that a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single fast feeding episode, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” says Suh.
The discovery of LID-568 also demonstrates that it is possible for a black hole to exceed its Eddington limit, and offers astronomers the first opportunity to study how this happens through James Webb’s observations.
With information from EFE.
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