Astronomers have spotted a young, blazing black hole that was already growing at a furious pace just one billion years after the Big Bang. This rare discovery provides a key to understanding how supermassive black holes formed in the universe’s earliest days.
Astronomers have identified a crucial clue in understanding how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe. They have discovered a blazar, a rare and powerful type of active galactic nucleus (AGN), so distant that its light has been traveling for 12.9 billion years to reach us.
The existence of this blazar suggests that many more like it existed in the early universe, forming a hidden population of AGN with powerful particle jets. This discovery is significant because black holes with jets are thought to grow much faster than those without. Understanding these early blazars could help explain how some black holes became supermassive so soon after the Big Bang.
Blazing Hearts of Galaxies
At the heart of many galaxies lie active galactic nuclei (AGN), some of the brightest objects in the universe. Their immense energy output comes from supermassive black holes, which pull in surrounding matter through a process called accretion. This process is the most efficient way known to physics to convert matter into energy, allowing AGN to shine brighter than all the stars in hundreds, thousands, or even more galaxies put together and in a volume of space smaller than our own solar system.
At least 10% of AGN produce powerful particle jets, streams of high-energy particles that shoot out from the area around the black hole in opposite directions. These jets are shaped and guided by the magnetic fields in the accretion disk, the swirling gas surrounding the black hole.
A special type of AGN, known as a blazar, is visible to us only if one of its jets happens to be pointed directly at Earth — an extremely rare alignment. This makes the blazar appear exceptionally bright, much like staring directly into a powerful flashlight. Blazars are also known for their rapid brightness changes, sometimes shifting in just hours or even minutes. These fluctuations are caused by turbulent activity in the accretion disk and complex interactions between the jet’s magnetic fields and charged particles.
Finding Active Galaxies in the Early Universe
The new discovery was the result of a systematic search for active galactic nuclei in the early universe conducted by Eduardo Bañados, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy who specializes in the first billion years of cosmic history, and an international team of astronomers. Since light takes time to reach us, we see distant objects as they were millions or even billions of years ago.
For the more distant objects, the so-called cosmological redshift, due to cosmic expansion, shifts their light to far longer wavelengths than the wavelengths at which the light was emitted. Bañados and his team exploited this fact, searching systematically for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible light (of the Dark Energy Legacy Survey, in this case) but that were bright sources in a radio survey (the 3 GHz VLASS survey).
A Billion-Year Journey Through Space
Among 20 candidates that met both criteria, only one designated J0410–0139 met the additional criterion of showing significant brightness fluctuations in the radio regime—raising the possibility that this was a blazar. The researchers then dug deeper, employing an unusually large battery of telescopes, including near-infrared observations with ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT), a spectrum with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), additional near-infrared spectra with the LBT, one of the Keck telescopes and the Magellan telescope, X-ray images from both ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra space telescopes, millimeter wave observations with the ALMA and NOEMA arrays, and more detailed radio observations with the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s VLA telescopes to confirm the object’s status as an AGN, and specifically a blazer.
The observations also yielded the distance of the AGN (via the redshift) and even found traces of the host galaxy in which the AGN is embedded. Light from that active galactic nucleus has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us (z=6.9964), carrying information about the universe as it was 12.9 billion years ago.
“Where There Is One, There’s One Hundred More”
According to Bañados, “The fact that J0410–0139 is a blazar, a jet that by chance happens to point directly towards Earth, has immediate statistical implications. As a real-life analogy, imagine that you read about someone who has won $100 million in a lottery. Given how rare such a win is, you can immediately deduce that there must have been many more people who participated in that lottery but have not won such an exorbitant amount. Similarly, finding one AGN with a jet pointing directly towards us implies that at that time, there must have been many AGN in that period of cosmic history with jets that do not point at us.”
Long story short, in the words of Silvia Belladitta, a post-doc at MPIA and co-author of the present publication: “Where there is one, there’s one hundred more.”
A Cosmic Lottery with Huge Implications
Light from the previous record-holder for the most distant blazar has taken about 100 million years less to reach us (z=6.1). The extra 100 million years might seem short in light of the fact we are looking back more than 12 billion years, but they make a crucial difference. This is a time when the universe is changing rapidly.
In those 100 million years, a supermassive black hole can increase its mass by an order of magnitude. Based on current models, the number of AGN should have increased by a factor of five to ten during those 100 million years.
Finding that there was such a blazar 12.8 billion years ago would not be unexpected. Finding that there was such a blazar 12.9 billion years ago, as in this case, is a different matter altogether.
Helping Black Holes Grow Since 12.9 Billion Years Ago
The presence of a whole population of AGN with jets at that particular early time has significant implications for cosmic history and the growth of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies in general. Black holes whose AGN have jets can potentially gain mass faster than black holes without jets.
Contrary to popular belief, it is difficult for gas to fall into a black hole. The natural thing for gas to do is to orbit the black hole, similar to the way a planet orbits the Sun, with increased speed as the gas gets closer to the black hole (“angular momentum conservation”). In order to fall in, the gas needs to slow down and lose energy. The magnetic fields associated with the particle jet, which interact with the swirling disk of gas, can provide such a “braking mechanism” and help the gas to fall in.
This means the consequences of the new discovery are likely to become a building block of any future model of black-hole growth in the early universe: they imply the existence of an abundance of active galactic nuclei 12.9 billion years ago that had jets, and thus had the associated magnetic fields that can help black holes grow at considerable speed.
References:
“A blazar in the epoch of reionization” by Eduardo Bañados, Emmanuel Momjian, Thomas Connor, Silvia Belladitta, Roberto Decarli, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Bram P. Venemans, Fabian Walter, Feige Wang, Zhang-Liang Xie, Aaron J. Barth, Anna-Christina Eilers, Xiaohui Fan, Yana Khusanova, Jan-Torge Schindler, Daniel Stern, Jinyi Yang, Irham Taufik Andika, Christopher L. Carilli, Emanuele P. Farina, Andrew Fabian, Joseph F. Hennawi, Antonio Pensabene and Sofía Rojas-Ruiz, 17 December 2024, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02431-4
“[C ii] Properties and Far-infrared Variability of a z = 7 Blazar” by Eduardo Bañados, Yana Khusanova, Roberto Decarli, Emmanuel Momjian, Fabian Walter, Thomas Connor, Christopher L. Carilli, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Sofía Rojas-Ruiz and Bram P. Venemans, 18 December 2024, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad823b
The results described here have been published as E. Bañados et al., “A blazar in the epoch of reionization” in Nature Astronomy, and as E. Bañados et al. “[CII] properties and Far-Infrared variability of a z = 7 blazar” in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The MPIA scientists involved are Eduardo Bañados, Silvia Belladitta (also INAF Bologna), Fabian Walter, Zhang-Liang Xie, Yana Khusanova, and Sofía Rojas-Ruiz (also UCLA), in collaboration with Emmanuel Momjian (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA), Thomas Connor (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Roberto Decarli (INAF Bologna) and Chiara Mazzucchelli (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile).
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4 Comments
Usa
Still believe in BB BS huh… why?
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