by Rendering of the artist of the James Webb telescope in Space Credit – Getty Images/iStockphoto
NThe James WebB World Camp Telescope from ASA continues to deliver the goods. On Christmas Day, 2021, it has since sent a storm of dazzling pictures and a lot of good science. Now webb has done it again. As the NASA reports, two astronomers who work with RAW-Webb data that the space agency regularly provides researchers found indications of a rapidly growing black hole in an unexpected place and formed in an unexpected way.
What had withdrawn the two astronomers – Pieter van Dokkumum from Yale University and Gabriel Brammer from the University of Copenhagen – was a few spiral galaxies that collided in space. Each galaxy has a black hole in the middle that was already present before the collision and spends a red glow that is surrounded by a ring of light and matter, which gives the overall formation the form of the infinity symbol. Van Dokkum and Brammer called the couple The Infinity Galaxy.
What surprised her was that the formation also housed a third, larger, super massive black hole – one with the mass of maybe a million suns. This black hole was not in the middle of one or the other galaxy, how a super massive black hole should be, but in the mashup of dust and gases between them. “Everything is unusual about this galaxy,” said van Dokkum in a comprehensive description that he wrote for NASA. “It not only looks strange, but also has this super massive black hole that attracts a lot of material.”
How the object was formed is unknown, but van Dokkum and Brammer have two theories that are referred to as “light seeds” and “heavy seeds”. In the Light Seeds version, a star explodes and its core collapses and forms a black hole with a mass of maybe 1,000 suns. Over time, other stars collapse nearby and form their own black holes, and finally all bodies merge into a super massive black hole. But this theory has a problem. “The merger process takes time,” says van Dokkum, “and WebB found incredibly massive black holes in incredibly early days in the universe – even too early to explain it.” This does not mean that the Light Seeds scenario never plays, but it means that it is not as common as astronomers may believe.
In the scenario of heavy seeds, a super massive black hole is formed directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud. In the infinity galaxy, this occurred during the collision when the galactic gas was shocked and compressed by the violence of cosmic crackup. “This compression could be enough to form a dense knot that is then compressed into a black hole,” says van Dokkum. This process is also called black hole as a direct breakdown. From this collision, not only a super massive black hole was formed that the black hole is still growing. Radio and X-ray emissions, which were confirmed by the Chandra X-ray observatory of the NASA and the very large array of the floor base, confirm that the black hole still pulls amazing amounts of dust and gas from its surroundings.
Van Dokkum and Brammer prefer the scenario with heavy seeds to explain what they found because it would be such a natural result of a galactic collision. “By looking at the Infinity Galaxy, we believe that we have put together a story about how this could have happened here,” says van Dokkum. But they admit that other, less likely events could explain the super massive black hole.
On the one hand, the body between the two galaxies in the Infinity galaxy could be an outdated black hole that was emitted from its overarching galaxy and now leads through the Infinity galaxy and was discovered by the web belzue during this relatively short interregnum. Alternatively, the super massive black hole could stand in the middle of a third galaxy, which happens to be in the foreground of the same sky area as the Infinity Galaxy. If this third galaxy were a dwarf galaxy, it might be weak enough that only the overwhelming gas and the dust that surrounds the black hole would be visible. But the researchers do not expect these theories to be exhibited. If the black hole were a runaway, the speed of the gases flowing into it would probably differ from the speed of the gases in Infinity galaxy. Although you have not yet measured the speed of the gases, you expect you to be similar. The idea that the black hole is in the middle of a dwarf galaxy can almost get out of control, since dwarf galaxies usually do not form such large black holes. Everything that is sufficient for astronomers to achieve at least a cautious victory in their discovery.
“We definitely cannot say that we have found a direct collapse black hole,” says van Dokkum. “But we can say that this new data strengthens the case that we see a newborn black hole and at the same time remove some of the competing explanations.”
Write Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.
