Ultra-Rare Black Hole Ancestor Detected at the Dawn of the Universe (livescience.com) 17
"Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole," reports Live Science:
The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.
Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now....
Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies. "Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement. In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said. Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar....
[T]here are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.
Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now....
Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies. "Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement. In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said. Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar....
[T]here are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.
GNz7q (Score:5, Funny)
Re: "Dawn of the Universe" (Score:3)
Well, no. Something CAN come from nothing, over small scales, so long as in aggregate nothing comes from nothing.
Re:"Dawn of the Universe" (Score:5, Interesting)
This language always bothered me. Something can not come from nothing.
That is a really tough question. You could say that it's the core question of cosmology: and it doesn't have an answer.
Your answer,
There is something. Therefore there has never been nothing. This is a simple truism - there is no "birth of the Universe"
essentially says "the universe has always existed". This, of course, violates the second law of thermodynamics.
But, yes, it seems that we have to discard one of the laws of physics. Maybe the second law of thermodynamics is the one to delete.
it's impossible for such a thing to exist. Maybe there's supposed to be an elliptical "known" in there or maybe "current", but the simple fact is that there always has been and always will be a "universe", it doesn't begin or end.
This is not known.
What is known is that 13.79 billion years ago (plus or minus error bars of 0.02 billion years), the universe that we see expanded from an extremely dense, hot, and compact form. We can still see the residual radiation from that; it's the microwave background radiation. We can calculate back from that some, and say the universe we observe today must have been extremely small at one time. We can call that "the dawn of the universe," but possibly we should more accurately call it "the dawn of the universe as we know it today", and admit that before that it was the universe as we do not know it.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't help me; I'm still trying to figur
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. We can extrapolate what the universe must have been like in time back to the point at which the physics we know starts to be insufficient to model the laws of the universe, but before that, we don't know how to extrapolate, because we don't know the laws.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is there a yo mamma joke in there?
Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)
If Soviet Russia built a Beowulf cluster of Ultra-Rare Black Hole Ancestors running Linux could Doom run on it??
In Soviet Russia Beowulf cluster of Ultra-Rare Black Hole Ancestors running Linux run DOOM on YOU!!
They found him! (Score:1, Troll)
Oh, good grief (Score:5, Funny)
So THAT'S where I left it!
So (Score:1)
Dammit, i don't know which is farther, 15 billion light years or that person's place in the far end of the LGBTQ acronym.