It wasn’t long after the Big Bang that the first galaxies began to change the universe. Less than a billion years later, they had already begun to gain weight. In particular, their central black holes were behemoths. New JWST images show two giant galaxies as they appeared less than a billion years after the universe began.
A single galaxy has a mass of 130 billion times the mass of the Sun. It is a black hole-driven quasar with 1.4 billion solar masses. (A quasar is the bright active core of a galaxy thought to be dominated by a supermassive black hole.) It appears that these galaxies and their central black holes are of completely different sizes compared to each other. Moreover, these fascinating people raise difficult questions. How did it get so big in the early Universe? And, what is the first thing? Galaxies or black holes?
This creates a picture that the international team of researchers led by Xuheng Ding and John Silverman (both of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe). They first announced their findings in the June 28, 2023 issue of Nature.
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Exploring the Hearts of Quasars
The quasars they observed are named J2236+0032 and J2255+0251. Their galaxy was first observed by the Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i. Both galaxies are relatively small and are good places to study the early universe. They lie at redshifts of 6.4 and 6.34. These are placed at a time when the universe was only 860 million years old. The research team at Kavli then used JWST to take a closer look at these objects.
JWST observed infrared wavelengths of 3.56 and 1.50 microns. In addition, JWST’s NIRSPEC spectrometer measured the number of stars in the galaxy. Analyzing what they found helped the two galaxies grow. It also revealed the speed of the air moving in their hearts. This allowed the team to determine the number of interstellar black holes that drive quasars.
Answering Questions about these Quasars
One thing jumped out from the data immediately: the number of galaxies and their black holes. It appears that the size of a supermassive black hole is proportional to the size of its galaxy. Astronomers are investigating this relationship in galaxies in the nearby universe, and have found that the larger a galaxy is, the larger its central galaxy must be. The two galaxies discovered on JWST show the same relationship between their mass and the mass of their black holes.
The implication here is that this relationship existed long ago in the history of the universe. This raises some questions about the mechanisms that combine galaxies and black holes to produce this ratio. Astronomers report several events. First, since these are the core of the galaxy ( quasars ), they can initiate the formation of stars in the galaxy through their jets and winds. But, the same activities can stop the birth of new stars. This is an interesting way of explaining what causes stars to form to track the mass of a black hole. Essentially, AGN put checks and balances on the galaxy’s growth.
Another theory is that the ratio of galaxies to black holes is controlled by the size of the black hole and the formation of stars using the same fuel. This can easily happen when two densely packed galaxies merge. Mergers usually lead to star formation, so this could have happened to these early galaxies at a time when mergers were a major factor. The third scenario suggests that there may be statistical consensus and that more studies need to be done.
You need more information
Data from the galaxies HSC J2236+0032 and HSC J2255+0251 have asked questions. Now it’s time for astronomers to see more of these things in the early universe to see if they can answer them. The team will continue their observations using JWST during Cycle 1. They already have telescope time to study J2236+0032 in more detail to answer some of the leading questions raised by the current mission. In particular, these studies can tell us whether galaxies came first or black holes came first. They will also reveal information about the growth of all galaxies and black hole-driven quasars in the early years of the Universe’s history.
For more information
Starlight and the first black holes: researchers identify galaxies that contained quasars in the early universe.
Observations from AGN-driven winds
The Connection Between Black Holes and Their Galaxies
Detecting starlight from quasar host galaxies at
redshift above 6
ArXiv release
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