Science: Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have looked back 13 billion years to discover a surprisingly isolated supermassive black hole-powered quasar. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations are confusing because isolated black holes should struggle to gather enough mass to reach supermassive status, especially just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The discovery further complicates the puzzle of how some black holes grew to masses equivalent to millions or billions of Suns when the universe was less than a billion years old. The findings came after a team of scientists used the JWST to study the environments of the five oldest known quasars, which formed when the universe was 600 to 700 million years old.
The team found that the surroundings of these quasars, known as “quasar fields,” were surprisingly diverse. Some were densely populated environments, according to the scientists, but others were sparsely populated “empty-reservoirs” that would struggle to feed the growth of supermassive black holes. “Contrary to previous belief, we find that, on average, these quasars are not necessarily located in those highest density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to sit somewhere in between,” Anna-Christina Eilers, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “It is difficult to explain how these quasars can grow so large, if they seem to have nothing to feed on.
” Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk at the hearts of all large galaxies in the relatively modern universe. Because no star is large enough to collapse and form a black hole with such a monstrous mass, scientists know that supermassive black holes must form differently from so-called “stellar-mass black holes,” with masses between 10 and 100 times the mass of the sun, which are born from the deaths of massive stars. Models suggest that supermassive black holes can develop from successive mergers of increasingly larger black holes – the problem, however, is that this process should take much longer than 1 billion years. Yet, JWST is observing supermassive black holes that have formed in much shorter time frames.
