The universe as we know it was created about 13.8 billion years ago by the Big Bang. And only 750 million years later, an object with the unwieldy name GNz7q evolved, impressing astronomers led by Seiji Fujimoto of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. The object combines two rare types of celestial bodies: dusty starburst galaxies and luminous quasars. This opens a new avenue for us to understand the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe,” says the scientist, commenting on the observation that which he and his team described in Nature..
Quasars are the brightest objects in space and emit very large amounts of radiation. They are caused by extremely massive black holes in the centers of galaxies, which can weigh several billion solar masses. However, it is still not clear why they appeared so early in the history of the universe and why they could have become so large so quickly. To date, their existence has been explained by the presence of early starburst galaxies, in which a very large number of stars develop in a very short time. The current black hole can rapidly absorb large amounts of matter, and thus quickly reach a critical mass at which it finally expels its dust blanket into the vastness of space and appears as a luminous quasar.
According to the data, GNz7q constitutes the progenitor of such an extremely supermassive black hole. The object is in a galaxy in which stars are forming intensively. The corresponding rate is 1,600 times that in our Milky Way. Stars, in turn, produce and heat cosmic dust that glows in the infrared, making GNz7q much brighter in this region than any other known object from the early part of the universe. Therefore, Fujimoto and colleagues postulate that GNz7q is the first known still-dust-covered and growing quasar known to science so far.
“Total coffee aficionado. Travel buff. Music ninja. Bacon nerd. Beeraholic.”
More Stories
Raising diamonds made easy – Spectrum Science
Everything related to prevention and treatment
“His presence speaks powerfully.”