Discovered black hole with explosive growth in the early days of the universe

Observed by a team that includes several researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, this black hole of billions of solar masses has a growth rate 2.4 times above the expected limit for this type of object.

How did the first generation of black holes formed? This remains one of the biggest questions of astrophysics.

To try to answer you, an international team of scientists, which includes several researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA), observed Quasar RACS J0320-35.

Located approximately 12.8 billion light years from Earth, this is Emit more x -rays than any other black hole observed in the first thousand million years of the universe – its growth rate is 2.4 times above the expected limit for these objects.

This result was last week in the magazine Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“The first billion years of the universe are becoming increasingly enigmatic. Not only do we continue to discover these gigantic black holes, previously considered impossiblebut we started to realize that they had extreme properties at that time, ”he says José Afonsoresearcher at IA and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and co-author of the article.

“This shows that the childhood of the universe, when the first stars and galaxies emerged, It was much more active and complex than we thought -A mystery that will continue to challenge us in the coming years, ”adds the Portuguese astronomer, the current president of the Portuguese Astronomy Society.

The black hole has a mass about MILL MILL MILLION TIMES TO THE SOL and is located 12.8 billion light years from Earthwhich means that we are observing it only 920 million years after the beginning of the universe.

This black hole feeds a quasar – An extremely bright object that overshadows whole galaxies. The energy source of this luminous “monster” is the huge amount of matter that warms when revolving around the black holewhich causes x -ray emission and visible light.

This gigantic amount of radiation creates pressure, by pushing the matter out, which Contrary the strength of gravity who tries to pull her to the black hole. When the amount of matter falling is large enough, radiation pressure exceeds the force of gravity, limiting the drop in more matter to the black hole – the so -called Eddington limit.

O RACS J0320-35 was discovered about two years agoas part of a search performed with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (Askap) radiotelescope, combined with optical data from Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter -American Observatory (CTIO).

To accurately determine the distance to quasar Observations of the Gemini-Enge telescope (Noirlab) telescope were used.

The team, which seeks to find out more of these gigantic black holes in the first 800 million years of the universe, also needed data from the X -ray Space Telescope (NASA) to determine the “out of the scale” growth of this, estimated in 2.4 times the eddington limit.

“This work highlights the immense potential of the latest astronomical surveys, made in wavelengths where the activity of black holes truly stands out – the Xeo radio rays ”, comments Israel maputealso investigator of IA and FCUL, and co-author of the article.

Scientists believe that black holes that grow more slowly than Eddington’s limit form with masses greater than 10,000 times The Sun, to be able to have reached a thousand million solar masses in the five million years after the Big Bang-the mass observed in RACS J0320-35.

A black hole with such a high initial mass can result from a exotic process: The collapse of a huge cloud of dense gas, with unusual quantities of heavier elements than helium, conditions that can be extremely rare.

If RACS J0320-35 is really growing at such a high rate and does it in a sustained way, then your black hole may have started conventionally, as result of the implosion of a massive starwith a mass of less than a hundred times the mass of the sun.

To determine the growth speed of this black hole (between 300 and 3000 solar masses a year), researchers compared computational models with the X -ray observations obtained by Chandra and found that the spectrum obtained has a very close correspondence expected in models with growth faster than Eddington’s limit.

Data in visible and infrared bands confirm that this black hole is gaining mass faster than the theoretical limit.

“When we study this quasar throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays, we found that its emission could only be explained by the fast Growth of a supermassive black hole“ Bruno ArsioliIA and FCULE investigator.

“Gamma ray analysis with the satellite Ferm-Lat reinforced the unprecedented nature of this discovery, which makes this an unique example of an extreme astrophysical object,” the astronomer adds.

Another pending issue addressed by this result concerns the origin of particle jets, which move away from some black holes at speeds close to that of light, as in RACS J0320-35.

Jets like this are rare in quasars, which may mean that the rapid growth rate of the black hole is somehow to contribute to the creation of these jets.