[NASA] NASA’s Hubble Finds More Black Holes than Expected in the Early Universe

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NASA’s Hubble Finds More ****** Holes than Expected in the Early Universe

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field of nearly 10,000 galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. The image required 800 exposures taken over 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Credits:
NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

With the help of NASA’s

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, an international team of researchers led by scientists in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University has found more ****** holes in the early universe than has previously been reported. The new result can help scientists understand how supermassive ****** holes were created.

Currently, scientists do not have a complete picture of how the first ****** holes formed not long after the big bang. It is known that supermassive ****** 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.

“Many of these objects seem to be more massive than we originally thought they could be at such early times — either they formed very massive or they grew extremely quickly,” said Alice Young, a PhD student from Stockholm University and co-author of the 

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  published in 

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This is a new image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The first deep imaging of the field was done with Hubble in 2004. The same survey field was observed again by Hubble several years later, and was then reimaged in 2023. By comparing Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 near-infrared exposures taken in 2009, 2012, and 2023, astronomers found evidence for flickering supermassive ****** holes in the hearts of early galaxies. One example is seen as a bright object in the inset. Some supermassive ****** holes do not ******** 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 ****** holes than predicted.

NASA, ESA, Matthew Hayes (Stockholm University); Acknowledgment: Steven V.W. Beckwith (UC Berkeley), Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz), Richard Ellis (UCL); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

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****** 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 ****** ***** evolution, the researchers used Hubble to survey how many ****** holes exist among a population of faint galaxies when the universe was just a few percent of its current age.

Initial observations of the 

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 were re-photographed by Hubble after several years. This allowed the team to measure variations in the brightness of galaxies. These variations are a telltale sign of ****** holes. The team identified more ****** holes than previously found by other methods.

The new observational results suggest that some ****** 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-generation stars are polluted by the remnants of stars that have already lived and *****. Other alternatives for ****** ***** formation include collapsing gas clouds, mergers of stars in massive clusters, and “primordial” ****** holes that formed (by physically speculative mechanisms) in the first few seconds after the big bang. With this new information about ****** ***** formation, more accurate models of galaxy formation can be constructed.

“The formation mechanism of early ****** holes is an important part of the puzzle of galaxy evolution,” said Matthew Hayes from the

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and lead author of the study. “Together with models for how ****** holes grow, galaxy evolution calculations can now be placed on a more physically motivated footing, with an accurate scheme for how ****** holes came into existence from collapsing massive stars.”

Image Before/After

Astronomers are also making 

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 with NASA’s 

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 to search for galactic ****** holes that formed soon after the big bang, to understand how massive they were and where they were located.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (********* Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

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Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s 

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, Greenbelt, MD
*****@*****.tld

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

Science Contact:

Matthew Hayes
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

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Last Updated

Sep 17, 2024

Editor

Andrea Gianopoulos

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