Hubble Space Telescope Finds More Black Holes Than Expected in Early Universe

Hubble Space Telescope Finds More Black Holes Than Expected in Early Universe

Scientists do not currently have a complete picture of how the first black holes formed, not long after the Big Bang. It is known that supermassive black holes, that can weigh more than a billion suns, exist at the center of several galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

This is a new image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. By comparing Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 near-infrared exposures taken in 2009, 2012, and 2023, astronomers found evidence for flickering supermassive black holes in the hearts of early galaxies. One example is seen as a bright object in the inset. There are supermassive black holes that do not swallow surrounding material constantly, but in fits and bursts, making their brightness flicker. This can be detected by comparing Hubble Ultra Deep Field frames taken at different epochs. The survey found more black holes than predicted.

Black holes play an important role in the lifecycle of all galaxies, but there are major uncertainties in our understanding of how galaxies evolve. In order to gain a complete picture of the link between galaxy and black hole evolution, the researchers used Hubble to survey how many black holes exist among a population of faint galaxies when the Universe was just a few percent of its current age.

The new observational results suggest that some black holes likely formed by the collapse of massive, pristine stars during the first billion years of cosmic time. These types of stars can only exist at very early times in the Universe, because later generations of stars are polluted by the remnants of stars that have already lived and died. Other alternatives for black hole formation include collapsing gas clouds, mergers of stars in massive clusters, and ‘primordial’ black holes that formed (by physically speculative mechanisms) in the first few seconds after the Big Bang. With this new information about black hole formation, more accurate models of galaxy formation can be constructed.

Image Description: This is a Hubble image of a black sky sprinkled with myriad galaxies of all shapes and sizes stretching back to nearly the beginning of the Universe. In the middle of the picture there is an inset box showing one sample pair of early galaxies. One galaxy is spiral-shaped and the other is spindle-shaped because it is a disc galaxy seen edge-on. The spindle-shaped galaxy has an active supermassive black hole that appears as a bright white spot. This is identified by comparing pictures of the same region taken at different epochs.

The image was created from Hubble data from the following proposals: 9978, 10086 (S. Beckwith); 11563 (G. Illingworth); 12498 (R. Ellis); and 17073 (M. Hayes). These images are composites of separate exposures acquired by the ACS and WFC3 instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Credit: NASA, European Space Agency,  M. Hayes (Stockholm University), J. DePasquale (STScI)

Release Date: Sept. 17, 2024

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