The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently discovered a large group of faint red dots in the distant Universe that could be supermassive baby holes.an unexpected discovery that could change our way of understanding the origin of these enormous objects.
The research, led by Jorryt Matthee, assistant professor of astrophysics at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA) and published this Thursday in “The Astrophysical Journal”, explains that until the arrival of the Webb, these types of objects were “indistinguishable.”
And the new telescope, one hundred times more sensitive than Hubble, can look at the universe further and better than its predecessor and observe even the first galaxies, thanks, above all, to the fact that It works in infrared, which allows you to see cold objects, very far away or hidden behind dust.
In its first year of service, it has observed unprecedented things, but this set of small red dots could be “an unexpected advance,” according to the study.
Although it was not developed for this, “JWST helped us determine that faint red dots — found far in the Universe's distant past — are small versions of extremely massive black holeswhich could change our way of understanding the genesis of black holes,” says Jorryt Matthee, professor at ISTA and lead author of the study.
The discovery could bring us a little closer to one of the biggest dilemmas in astronomy, knowing how supermassive black holes were formed.
1 / 10 | NASA reveals stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope has produced the sharpest and deepest infrared image of the distant universe. It is known as “Webb's First Deep Field.” – NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
These enigmatic objects They have so much gravity that they suck anything in (cosmic dust, planets and stars), while warping space and time around them in such a way that not even light can escape.
The general theory of relativity, published by Albert Einstein more than a century ago, predicted that black holes could have any mass.
Some of the most intriguing black holes are supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which could reach millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Astrophysicists agree that there is an SMBH at the center of almost all large galaxies. The proof that Sagittarius A* is a SMBH at the center of our Galaxy with more than four million times the mass of the Sun earned him the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.
But not all SMBHs are the same. While Sagittarius A* could be compared to a dormant volcano, other SMBHs grow extremely rapidly, engulfing astronomical amounts of matter, making them so luminous that they can be observed to the edge of the constantly expanding Universe.
These SMBHs are called quasars and are among the brightest objects in the Universe.
“One problem with quasars is that some of them appear to be excessively massive, too massive given the age of the Universe at which quasars are observed. “We call them problem quasars,” Matthee said.
“If we take into account that quasars originate from the explosions of massive stars — and that we know their maximum growth rate from the general laws of physics — It seems that some of them have grown faster than is possible. It's like looking at a five-year-old child who is six feet tall. Something doesn't add up,” he explained.
In the new study, Matthee and his team have identified a population of objects that appear as small red dots in the JWST images and that are not the gigantic cosmic monsters found in the overly massive SMBHs.
“While the 'problem quasars' are blue, extremely bright and reach billions of times the mass of the Sun, the red dots are more like 'baby quasars'.. Their masses are between ten and one hundred million solar masses. Additionally, they appear red because they are covered in dust. The dust hides the black holes and reddens the colors,” he explained.
Matthee and his team believe that, over time, “The flow of gas from the black holes will pierce the dust cocoon and the giants will evolve from these small red dots”.
Thus, they suggest that the small red dots are small, red versions of giant blue SMBHs in the phase before the problematic quasars.
“Studying baby versions of overly massive SMBHs in more detail will give us a better understanding of how problematic quasars come to exist.”, he concluded.