A team of astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered the most distant supermassive black hole from our planet. It is located in the center of a bright quasar, the light from which reached the Earth only 13 billion years later. So that you can estimate this time interval, let's say more simply: this is the approximate age of our Universe. The black hole in mass exceeds the Sun by 800 million times and is of great interest for science, since it belongs to the early period after the emergence of the Universe. In addition, its very existence raises a number of interesting questions among researchers.
“This is the only object that we can observe from that era. This black hole has an extremely high mass, and given that the universe is young enough, it simply should not exist. A black hole could not reach such a mass in such a short period of time. And it puzzles us a lot,”says MIT physics professor Robert Simcoe.
Even more questions are raised by the environment in which the black hole formed. Scientists agreed that the hole arose at the very moment when the universe underwent a fundamental shift - moving from an opaque environment dominated by neutral hydrogen to one in which the first stars began to appear. As a large number of stars and galaxies formed, they began to generate enough radiation to transition hydrogen from a neutral to an ionized state. The discovered black hole existed in a medium that was half neutral and half ionized.
The anomalous black hole was discovered by astronomer Eduardo Banados, who stumbled upon it while exploring a map of a distant universe. In particular, Eduardo investigated quasars - some of the brightest astronomical objects, which are supermassive black holes surrounded by bright accretion disks made of matter. For his research, the scientist used a tool called FIRE (Folded-port InfraRed Echellette) - a spectrometer that classifies objects based on their infrared spectrum. The device was developed with the participation of the same professor Robert Simcoe, and today it operates in the 6.5-meter Giant Magellanic Telescope, located in Chile.
Using FIRE, scientists calculated the age of one of the quasars, and it turned out that it began to emit light only 690 million years after the Big Bang. Based on the "redshift" of the quasar, the researchers also managed to calculate the mass of the black hole at its center. This discovery and the questions generated by it once again suggest that there are still many mysteries in the Universe that scientists will have to puzzle over for tens or even hundreds of years. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature.
Sergey Gray