As astronomers push our views of the Universe further back in time, their telescopes keep uncovering surprises. This is the case for a supermassive black hole in CEERS 1019, a distant primitive galaxy.
How soon? It already existed and was forming about 570 million years after the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) caught a glimpse of it and studied its black hole. It also took data on two other black holes as they were when the Universe was about a billion years old.
These discoveries of galaxies and black holes are part of a special observing program with JWST. It’s called the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. The idea is to obtain detailed images and spectra of early distant objects in infrared and mid-infrared light. Objects in the early universe glow with ultraviolet and visible light. However, when their light reaches us, it is “stretched” in the infrared regime. Since infrared can also penetrate through dusty regions, it offers the added benefit of seeing objects that would otherwise be hidden.
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Finding black holes in the early universe in early galaxies opens up our understanding of that time in cosmic history. It is shortly after the Big Bang. For example, this newly discovered CEERS galaxy and its active supermassive black hole surprised astronomers. CEERS 1019 existed at a time when the first galaxies were forming. So, they should be small and relatively featureless, right? And, if they have black holes in that early epoch, those should be relatively low mass (for black holes, that is). Right?
A small galaxy and its black hole
Well, it’s complicated. It turns out those black holes ARE of lower mass. But at least one of them is even bigger than it should be. How do we know this? JWST can study both early galaxies and their black holes, according to Steve Finkelstein, PI of the CEERS survey. Until now, research on objects in the early Universe was largely theoretical, he said. With Webb, not only can we see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, we can now begin to measure them precisely. This is the enormous power of this telescope.
So how do CEERS 1019 and its black hole measure up? The galaxy itself appears as three bright clusters without a disk. So, it’s still assembling itself and churning out new stars as it builds its structure. We weren’t used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances, said CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor of astronomy at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. A merger of galaxies may be partly responsible for fueling activity in this galaxy’s black hole, which could also lead to more star formation.
And that newborn supermassive black hole? It is quite busy ingesting gas and is found to have 9 million solar masses. It’s smaller than some black holes of its era, but still bigger than expected. It exists so early in history that it appears to have formed shortly after the start of the Universe, which is intriguing.
Interestingly, the black hole turns out to be more similar to Sagittarius A*, the one at the center of the Milky Way. And that’s exciting even if it’s still baffling. Looking at this distant object with this telescope is a lot like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies close to our own, said Rebecca Larson, a recent Ph.D. graduate at UT Austin who led the study of these objects. . There are so many spectral lines to analyze!
About those ghostly lines
While the infrared view shows us the structure of the galaxy, the spectral lines reveal other features. For example, spectra can pinpoint high-energy outflow rates and temperatures. In the case of CEERS 1019, the spectroscope captures both the black hole and its host galaxy. Its data reveal the black hole’s appetite for gas and rate of star formation. It will be interesting to see if this scenario plays out in other galaxies in the CEERS survey. Meanwhile, however, these early discoveries are preparing astronomers to refine their ideas about black holes and galaxy formation in the nascent universe.
In particular, CEERS focuses on these objects as they existed in the Era of Reionization. This is a point in cosmic history where light began traveling freely throughout the expanding universe. That light came from early stars and ionized the gas between stars and galaxies. It also appears that galaxies began assembling during this time (and perhaps even earlier). The survey data covers the accumulation of stars (stellar mass), the resulting morphological changes in galaxies, as well as the growth of those first black holes. So studying this period is key to drawing a timeline of the origins and evolution of the Universe through the accumulation and transformation of those early galaxies. This is one of the key objectives of the JWST, which is just completing its first full year of observing the infrared universe.
For more information
The Webb telescope detects the most distant active supermassive black hole
Focus on the JWST Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) investigation.
Webb detects the most distant active supermassive black hole to date
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