Discovered Only 700 Million Years After The Big Bang, The Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1 Is Older Than The Galaxy Surrounding It And The First Direct Black Hole Mass Measurement In The First Billion Years Of The Universe
According to ScienceAlert, citing two new papers published in Nature and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found a supermassive black hole of 50 million solar masses that appears to predate its host galaxy, directly contradicting the established model of how these phenomenon form and grow.
The object, Abell2744-QSO1, is a “Little Red Dot”; a category of compact early-universe objects discovered by the JWST located just 700 million years after the Big Bang. It is only 1,300 light years across, and gravitationally lensed by the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster), which both magnifies and triples it, enabling detailed observation.
The standard model holds that stellar-mass black holes seed supermassive ones through accretion and galaxy mergers over billions of years. But QSO1’s black hole makes up a massive portion of its galaxy’s mass; something never observed in the local Universe. The lead researchers from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute used JWST’s NIRSpec to measure the gravitational effect on surrounding gas directly; the first direct mass measurement of a black hole within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
“This is a remarkable finding. It’s a paradigm shift, a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow,” said Professor Roberto Maiolino.
To check out our previous coverage on astrophysics and JWST discoveries, read our articles here.
