2023-07-02 16:19:22
Supermassive black holes have a mysterious origin. They are behind the quasars of the active nuclei of galaxies and the James-Webb telescope has just spectacularly broken the Hubble record for revealing galaxies that once had a quasar.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to push the boundaries of observations once accessible to Hubble and this time, studying in conjunction with Japan’s Subaru Telescope on one of Hawaii’s peaks, Mauna Kea. An international team of astronomers including members of the CNRS-Insu and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) looked in this direction at the images of two quasars HSC J2236+0032 and HSC J2255+0251, as shown in an article published in Nature and freely available on arXiv.
Remember that quasars perplexed astrophysicists in the early 1960s because initially detected as distant radio sources, they appeared as stars in telescopes observing in the visible. These stars had to be prodigiously luminous to be detectable billions of light-years away, and it was understood during the decade that they had to be galaxies whose core was occupied by a supermassive black hole accreting enormous amounts of matter to an unknown reason and thus releasing gravitational energy, much more efficiently than thermonuclear reactions in the heart of stars.
Black holes that appeared abnormally soon following the Big Bang?
We do not really know yet how black holes containing from one to several billion solar masses are born behind the active nuclei of galaxies that are quasars, but what is established is that there is a relationship of proportionality between the mass of giant black holes and the mass of the galaxies that house them.
We used to think that large galaxies and their black holes take over a billion years to form, but observations over the past two decades, and more recently with the JWST, have consistently shown that these stars appeared very early in the history of the cosmos to the point of wondering if they were compatible with the standard model in cosmology. Quasars visible at great distances are therefore carefully studied to probe the oldest possible strata of light in the history of the observable Universe.
Hubble mightn’t see the galaxies associated with quasars when observed, just under three billion years following the Big Bang at most, but the JWST has just smashed that limit with the two quasars discovered during a program from the Subaru Telescope, showing their host galaxies as they were only 860 million years following the Big Bang.
Images of the two quasars and their galaxies were taken at infrared wavelengths of 3.56 and 1.50 microns with JWST’s NIRCam instrument.
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