NASA/JPL-Caltech
Twinkling quasar from the early universe. This artistic representation illustrates the accretion disk of a quasar
At the center of virtually every galaxy, including the Milky Way, there is a supermassive black hole. When it is active, it attracts matter in the form of gas and dust, forming an accretion disk.
According to , the most energetic supermassive black holes are known as quasars and are among the most active and luminous objects in the universe.
In a new one, published this Monday in Nature Astronomyresearchers have detected a twinkling quasar coming from the early universe. These tracked the quasar’s light to the “cosmic dawn“, just 850 million years after or Big Bang.
“Although many quasars have been discovered in the early universe, this is the first time we have observed one twinkling,” said the study’s first author, Gene Leung.
Forming black holes should be more unstable systems, with accretion disks that appear thicker. However, this quasar adds to the mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so quickly.
For a long time, it was believed that the first galaxies would take more than billion years to stabilize. Therefore, scientists did not expect to find supermassive black holes so early in the history of the universe.
However, since the beginning of the 2000s, more than 200 black holes supermassives in the first billion years after the Big Bang. These objects were detectable because they were in an extremely active quasar phase, emitting enormous amounts of detectable radiation. 13 billion light years of Earth.
Scientists were looking to detect a twinkling quasar to better understand the structure of the first supermassive black holes. The task was difficult, since the expansion of the Universe stretches the light emitted by very distant objects, bending it towards redder wavelengths — a phenomenon known as redshift.
Thus, a flicker that would occur over weeks may appear to last for months when observed from billions of light years away.
To overcome this challenge, the team analyzed infrared data collected over several years by the mission NEOWISE and NASA.
By studying the oscillations of light at different wavelengths, researchers were able to map the structure of the accretion disk. Because materials closer to the black hole are hotter, each wavelength provides information about different regions of the disk.
The results revealed something unexpected. The accretion disk is up and flata feature typically associated with older, more stabilized black holes.
“This provides direct evidence that the same feeding processes and structures observed in the nearby universe already existed at very remote times, despite very different cosmic environments”, concluded the study co-author, Anna Christina Eilers.
The team now hopes to observe even older quasars to reconstruct the conditions that allowed the first supermassive black holes to emerge.
