Scientists say that an object found in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest black holes.
The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, is in line with theoretical predictions of what a supermassive black hole might look like.
It's unlikely that discovering GNz7q was just dumb luck, says astronomer Gabriel Brammer.
The prevalence of such sources may be higher than previously thought.
The caption and credit are from NASA.
The Hubble GOODS-North field has a red dot in the center. The Cosmic Dawn Center is a part of the Niels Bohr Institute.
The Cosmic Dawn spans from 50 million years after the Big bang to 1 billion years after the creation of the universe.
At some point in the Universe's evolution, supermassive black holes appeared. When and how remain open questions in astrophysics.
The most distant quasar on record was found last year and it was the oldest black hole ever found.
Where does J0313 come from? What kind of objects were the evolutionary predecessors to black holes in the early stretches of the Universe?
Scientists have some ideas.
Simulations show an evolutionary sequence of dust-reddened quasars emerging from heavily dust-obscured starbursts that then transition to unobscured quasars by expelling gas and dust.
Although the last phase has been identified out to a redshift of 7.6, a transitioning quasar has not been found.
That is until now. An analysis of archival observation data captured by the Hubble Space Telescope identified GNz7q. Scientists have been trying to find the elusive ancestor.
The black hole was found in a comprehensively studied region of the night sky, but only now has aspectral analysis identified what it was.
Fujimoto says that the analysis suggests that GNz7q is the first example of a rapidly growing black hole in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy.
The object's properties are in agreement with predictions from theoretical simulations.
According to the researchers, the host galaxy of GNz7q is incredibly active, forming around 1,600 solar mass of stars per year, or at least it was around 13 billion years ago.
The light emission of GNz7q matches the black hole profile due to its brightness in ultraviolet wavelength and absence of X-ray emission.
The characteristics are a perfect match for a black hole.
The team explains in their paper that its properties are in agreement with the transition phase of the evolutionary paradigm of supermassive black holes.
This is what we predicted a black hole would look like after it traveled 13 billion light-years to reach us.
The phenomenon of the Universe expanding would cause GNz7q to be twice as far away from us as we are today.
How bright is it now?
Nature reported the findings.
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