Astronomers may have discovered the first ever newborn supermassive black hole, which suggests that these massive objects can form rapidly throughout the history of the cosmos. The discovery was made in a distant galaxy known as the Infinity Galaxy, located 8 billion lightyears from Earth.
Supermassive black holes are found at the centre of most major galaxies, including our own Milky Way. These black holes can be seen as bright centres of galaxies due to the enormous amounts of energy generated when matter falls towards them. The discovery of a newborn supermassive black hole in the Infinity Galaxy could provide clues about why massive black holes have been observed soon after the Big Bang.
The Infinity Galaxy is a unique object, consisting of two rings of stars and gas. Astronomers discovered it by looking through data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope archive. The team used archival X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio data from the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to uncover a growing supermassive black hole in this galaxy.
The discovery was made by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, who led the study. The team found that the black hole is not located inside either of the two nuclei of the merging galaxies, but rather in the middle of the cloud of gas. They suggest that the black hole may have formed from the cloud of gas within the galaxy or migrated from elsewhere.
The results provide evidence for a new theory about how supermassive black holes form. The ‘heavy seeds’ theory suggests that larger black holes can form directly from the collapse of large clouds of gas, rather than through the growth of smaller black holes. This discovery could have significant implications for our understanding of black hole formation and the evolution of galaxies.
The study provides new insights into how supermassive black holes can be formed rapidly throughout cosmic time. The observation that the velocity of the black hole is similar to that of the gas in the galaxy suggests that the black hole likely formed within the cloud of gas and did so recently, after the collision of the galaxies about 50 million years earlier.
Source: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/infinity-galaxy-supermassive-black-hole