Unraveling the Puzzles of the Initial Cosmic Giants: Supermassive Black Holes
New discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have shed light on the rapid formation and growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe. These findings challenge traditional models of black hole growth and offer intriguing possibilities for astronomers to explore.
Heavy Seed Hypothesis
One theory that gains support from JWST observations is the heavy seed hypothesis. Instead of growing from smaller stellar remnants, some SMBHs formed directly from the collapse of immense gas clouds a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. These "direct collapse black holes" jump-started SMBHs already quite massive, speeding up their growth rate beyond what star-collapse remnants alone could explain.
Primordial Black Holes
Another possibility is that some primordial black holes formed very shortly after the Big Bang, before stars even existed. These ancient black holes might have acted as "cosmic seeds," accelerating matter clumping and star formation around them, helping form early galaxies and potentially SMBHs. However, their exact role is still uncertain.
Early Black Hole Populations
JWST data reveals a significant number of smaller black holes in addition to the large ones, supporting a picture where black holes of various sizes all contributed to early galaxy and SMBH growth.
Constraints of Fast Growth
The problem with SMBH formation from just stellar-mass black holes is timescale—it takes too long to reach billions of solar masses within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang through ordinary accretion and mergers alone. Direct collapse and primordial seeds provide faster pathways.
The Case of J1120+0641
One such supermassive black hole is located at the heart of the galaxy J1120+0641. With a mass a billion times greater than that of the Sun, this black hole was observed when the Universe was approximately 770 million years old, only 5% of its current age. The temperature of the dust in the torus surrounding the accretion disk of J1120+0641 is approximately one hundred degrees higher than that observed around more recent supermassive black holes.
The Eddington Limit
The radiation pressure exerted by the light emissions from these quasars, including from J1120+0641, could limit the amount of matter that can be accreted by the black hole, a phenomenon known as the Eddington limit.
Implications and Future Research
The existence of these supermassive black holes in the early Universe suggests that the processes of formation and growth of the first black holes were more complex and diverse than current models suggest. These discoveries open up new questions and possibilities for astronomers to explore, potentially leading to a revised understanding of black hole growth and the early Universe.
The details of this work are published in Nature Astronomy.
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