Space experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made a big discovery from close to the beginning of time concerning supermassive black holes and dark matter.
Using the $10 billion (£7.7 billion) James Webb Space Telescope, MIT astronomers have been able to effectively look back in time to more than 12 billion years ago.
The telescope, dubbed the James Webb or JWST, was together by NASA alongside the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and is humanity’s most advanced piece of equipment when it comes to discovering the cosmos’ hidden secrets.
The technology on board the telescope means it can take images from deep in space using its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which is effectively a real life time machine.
It’s a bit hard to comprehend, but it all comes down to how light travels.
What is being captured by the telescope is light that has, in some cases, travelled billions of years to get to the telescope.
So the image captured by the JWST is ‘new’ to us but is, in fact, up to 13 billion years old – depending on where it comes from.
Now, using the James Webb, MIT boffins have been observing something called quasars, which are the extremely bright cores of galaxy that has a supermassive black hole right in the middle of it.
:This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright spheres), challenging physicists’ understanding of how the first quasars and supermassive black holes formed (Christina Eilers / EIGER team)
As the black hole draws in surrounding gas and dust, it blasts out an enormous amount of energy, making quasars some of the brightest objects in the universe.
Using the JWST to look at five ancient quasars from some 13 billion years ago, their existence has left scientists puzzled given that they exist in huge parts of space where there is not much else. Black holes need matter to grow, according to science.
“Contrary to previous belief, we find on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere,” says Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT.
“It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from.”
There is a possibility that these quasars may not be as isolated as they appear, MIT says, but are instead surrounded by galaxies that are heavily shrouded in dust and therefore hidden from view.
But is dark matter also playing a part?
CGI of the James Webb Space Telescope floating through space (JPL / NASA)
For those who haven’t nerded it up on Wikipedia entries before, dark matter is an as-yet unknown form of matter that has no other interactions with its surroundings other than through gravity.
After the Big Bang, the experts in space believe the early universe had dark matter pulling and pushing gas and dust, before eventually coming together to form objects such as planets and stars.
“The cosmic web of dark matter is a solid prediction of our cosmological model of the universe, and it can be described in detail using numerical simulations,” says co-author Elia Pizzati, a graduate student at Leiden University. “By comparing our observations to these simulations, we can determine where in the cosmic web quasars are located.”
For Eilers, the biggest question remains: how did these supermassive black holes form in isolated locations when the universe was so young? Well, it is likely that it is not due to dark matter, according to the experts, due to how the universe was at the time.
Instead, the MIT team simply don’t know yet. Eilers said: “If there’s not enough material around for some quasars to be able to grow continuously, that means there must be some other way that they can grow, that we have yet to figure out.”
Eilers and her colleagues report their findings in a paper appearing in the Astrophysical Journal.