Gargantua in the Mist: A Precocious Black Hole Behemoth at the Edge of Cosmic Dawn
(7 December 2017)
The new super-massive black hole J1342+0928 (yellow star), which resides in a mostly neutral universe at the edge of cosmic dawn, is more distant than any other found to date (yellow dots).
Image Credit: Jinyi Yang, University of Arizona; Reidar Hahn, Fermilab; M. Newhouse NOAO/AURA/NSF
Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of many galaxies. While some — like the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy — live quiet lives, occasionally snacking on a star or two, others feed voraciously, consuming gas and stars and growing rapidly in mass.
A Record-Breaking Quasar
To understand when supermassive black holes first appeared, astronomers scan the skies for actively-feeding black holes (known as “quasars”) from the Universe’s distant past. The latest discovery, by a team led by Eduardo Bañados (Carnegie Observatories) and published today in the journal Nature, is a record-breaker: J1342+0928, the most distant quasar known.
The new quasar is spotted at a redshift of 7.54, when the Universe was only 690 million years old, or 5% of its current age. The Universe was rapidly changing at this time. The first galaxies were appearing, and their energetic radiation had begun to ionize the surrounding intergalactic gas, illuminating and forever transforming the Universe from neutral to ionized. The discovery that the new quasar resides in a primarily neutral Universe places it solidly in this era, at the edge of cosmic dawn.
A Behemoth Black Hole
Despite its young age, the quasar harbors a whopper of a black hole, 800 million times the mass of the Sun.
For coauthor Xiaohui Fan (University of Arizona), it is amazing to discover so massive a black hole so early in cosmic history. “The new quasar is itself one of the first galaxies, and yet it already harbors a behemoth black hole as massive as others in the present-day Universe!” he remarked. The discovery challenges our understanding of the early growth of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. See the NOAO News Release NO: NOAO 17-07
The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) is a complex of astronomical telescopes and instruments located at 30.169 S, 70.804 W, approximately 80 km to the East of La Serena, Chile, at an altitude of 2200 meters. CTIO headquarters are located in La Serena, Chile, about 300 miles north of Santiago.
The CTIO complex is part of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), along with the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Tucson, Arizona. NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). CTIO, as part of the AURA Observatory in Chile, operates in Chile under Chilean law, through an Agreement with the University of Chile and with the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile.
The principal telescopes on site are the 4-m Victor M. Blanco Telescope and the 4.1-m Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope. One of the two 8-m telescopes comprising the Gemini Observatory is co-located with CTIO on AURA property in Chile, together with more than 10 other telescopes and astronomical projects.