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Illustration of two small black holes trapped in the accretion disk of a larger black hole. According to new observations from the James Webb Telescope, the universe may have had tiny black holes long before the first stars and galaxies evolved. | Credit: Caltech/R. Injured (IPAC)
They are large, appear early in the history of the universe, and where they came from has long been a mystery. Ever since astronomers first discovered the existence of supermassives black holes At the center of most galaxies, it has been difficult to fully explain their origin.
However, a recent observation with James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could help unravel the mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so quickly to become the goliaths of the early universe.
Object QSO1 is in a galaxy cluster Abel 2744 (also known as Pandora’s Box). The mass in the cluster acts as a gravitational lens that can focus and reshape light from distant sources, making them appear brighter in multiple locations. The light from QSO1 was emitted when the Universe was about 700 million years old (its current age is nearly 14 billion years).
Black hole QSO1 was first analyzed in 2024 in Februarywhich revealed that the galaxy contains a black hole with a mass roughly equal to 50 million suns.
Recently an ongoing study led by Ignas Juojžbalis from the University of Cambridge confirmed the initial mass estimate and also showed unequivocally that QSO1 lacks a significant gas-stellar component. Instead of a black hole at the center of the galaxy, the black hole itself appears to dominate the system, with the wider galaxy absent.
“It’s a very strange system,” Marta VolunteersProfessor at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, said in an interview with LiveScience. “If there are more of them, it will be really strange.
Volonteri is the world’s leading expert on the formation of supermassive black holes and contributed to the analysis of black hole mass. “I double-checked the results with my code. There is very little room in the system for any large mass other than the mass of the black hole,” she said.
The QSO1 black hole has about twice the mass of the surrounding gas and stars. In contrast, a black hole Sagittarius A*at the center of the Milky Way, the mass is only a small fraction of the total mass of the galaxy.
An example of the “Little Red Dots” (circled) observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. These mysterious early universe objects suggest that black holes, galaxies, or both evolved earlier than previously thought. | Credit: Bangzheng “Tom” Sun
Mysterious little red dots
When JWST began collecting data in 2022, it made a surprising discovery: many compact, red-hued galaxies called “little red dots” observed at epochs corresponding to about 500 to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
Their exact nature remains a mystery, but these ancient systems seem to indicate that galaxies, black holes, or both evolved earlier and were more massive or dense than astronomers previously believed.
Black holes can form when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse under their own gravity. At the dawn of the universe, these early black holes would have grown by feeding on a buffet of stars, gas clouds, and other black holes. But when astronomers calculate how quickly such stellar-mass black holes can accumulate matter, they struggle to explain how they could have grown into the cosmic behemoths observed by JWST.
One alternative scenario is that, rather than being created from stars, some black holes in the early universe may have formed directly from the collapse of huge clouds of much more massive gas. Such a scenario was confirmed by the discovery UHZ-1a black hole that shows signs of imminent collapse according to The study is led by Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University.
But system QSO1, one of several hundred tiny red dots analyzed by astronomers, appears to have formed differently.
“My co-authors suggested that its origin could be a primordial black hole or dark matter that has fallen apart because of how it interacts with itself, Volonteri said. – In any case, the black hole existed long before ordinary matter like gas and stars.
ESA illustration showing two possible models of the universe – the standard model (top), in which stars and galaxies formed before black holes, and the primordial black hole model (bottom), where the earliest black holes formed before the galaxies formed around them. | Credit: ESA
Primary black holes
in 1967 Soviet physicist Yakov B. Zeldovich and Igor D. Novikov suggested that for a brief moment after the Big Bang, some regions of the universe had so much mass that they exploded into black holes. The idea was further developed by Stephen Hawking in 1971and has since been studied theoretically and observationally by several astrophysicists.
These primordial black holes would not only help grow in size, but would also end up at the dead centers of galaxies forming around them. “The fact that the black hole in QSO1 grew this way without any star formation suggests a case where it evolved significantly faster than the galaxy,” Volonter said.
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So the question is, does the discovery of QSO1 solve the chicken-or-the-egg problem of which came first: the galaxy or the black hole at its center?
“This is one object that is still under review. I hope that this whole analysis is correct, but it is very complicated. But what we used to call exotic models may not be so exotic anymore,” concluded Volonteri.
Marta Volonteri was previously interviewed by the author of the book Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earthwhich contains more information about her work and the origin of supermassive black holes. Read the exclusive excerpt here.