4 Nov 2024

This artist’s illustration shows a red, early-Universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA's JWST and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s ‘feast’ could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early Universe.

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the Universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate, seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early Universe.

LID-568 was discovered by astronomers who used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a sample of galaxies from the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray part of the spectrum, but are invisible in the optical and near-infrared. JWST’s unique infrared sensitivity allows it to detect these faint counterpart emissions.

The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.

LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can achieve, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.

These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole ‘seeds’, which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the Universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.

Visual Description:

This release features an illustration of the galaxy in which black hole LID-568 resides. A smaller illustration of black hole itself, in an outlined box, is superimposed on top of the galaxy image toward our upper right. Two lines extend from a single point in the middle of the galaxy and terminate on corners of the outlined box containing the black hole illustration. The placement of the lines and outlined box indicate that the superimposed black hole image is an enlargement of a tiny place in the center of the galaxy.

The galaxy illustration resembles a puffy red cloud, lightly flecked with stars in shades of blue and white. The central portion of the galaxy is bright white, indicating that it's densely packed with stars. The black hole illustration shows LID-568 as a swirl of red and white material, similar in character to water circling a drain. A bright white jet of particles, resembling a laser beam, shoots upward from the black hole.

[Image]

(B) Chandra data from the COSMOS ("cosmic evolution survey") Legacy Survey.