Forget the “little green men”—it’s the “little red dots” in the infant universe that caught the eye of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The strange red bodies, scientists say, hide stars that models suggest are “too old” to have lived in the early cosmic times and black holes that are thousands of times more massive than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Milk. Scientists believe these objects must have been born in a way unique to the early universe – a method that appears to have come to rest in the cosmos after about 1 billion years of its existence.
The three small red dots are seen as they were when the universe was between 600 and 800 million years old. Although this may seem like an extremely long time after the Big Bang, the fact that the universe is 13.8 billion years old means that it was no more than 5% of its current age when these objects existed.
By confirming the existence of these points in the early universe, these JWST findings may challenge what we know about the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes that reside at their hearts.
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The team, led by scientists from Penn State University, saw these mysterious purple cosmic wonders when probing the early universe with JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument as part of the RUBIES survey.
“It’s very confusing,” team member Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. “You can make this fit uncomfortably into our current model of the universe, but only if we conjure up an exotic, extremely fast formation at the beginning of time.
“This is, without a doubt, the most unique and interesting group of objects I have seen in my career.”
What’s behind the dots?
The researchers studied the intensity of different wavelengths of light coming from the tiny red dots. This revealed signs that the stars are hundreds of millions of years old – much older than expected for stars at this early stage of the cosmos.
The researchers also saw traces of supermassive black holes within regions of tiny red dots with masses equivalent to millions, sometimes billions, of suns. These black holes are between 100 and 1000 times more massive than Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way located just 26,000 light-years from Earth.
Both of these discoveries are not expected according to current models of cosmic evolution, galaxy growth, or the formation of supermassive black holes. All these theories suggest that galaxies and supermassive black holes grow in small steps – but this growth takes billions of years.
“We have confirmed that these appear to be filled with ancient stars – hundreds of millions of years old – in a universe that is only [600 million to 800 million years] Old. Surprisingly, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of old starlight,” research leader Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State, said in the statement. “It was completely unexpected to find old stars in a very old universe. young. Standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been remarkably successful, yet these bright objects do not fit well into those theories.”
The team first spotted the tiny red dots while using JWST in July. At the time, researchers immediately suspected that the objects were actually galaxies that existed approximately 13.5 billion years ago.
Deeper investigation of the light spectrum of these objects confirmed these as galaxies that lived through the dawn of time and also revealed that “supermassive” supermassive black holes and unlikely “old” stars were powering the points’ impressive light output. Red.
The team is not yet sure how much of the light from the tiny red dots comes from each of these sources. This means that these galaxies are either unexpectedly older and more massive than the Milky Way, having formed much earlier than models predict, or they have normal amounts of mass but are somehow supermassive black holes – voids which are much more massive than a similar galaxy would have been during the current age of the cosmos.
“Distinguishing between light from material falling into a black hole and light emitted by stars in these small, distant objects is challenging,” Wang said. “This inability to show variation in the current data set leaves ample room for interpretation of these intriguing artifacts.”
This is no ordinary supermassive black hole!
Of course, all black holes have light-capturing limits called “event horizons,” meaning that whatever light they contribute to the tiny red dots must come from the material surrounding them and not from within.
The immense gravitational pull of black holes creates turbulent conditions in this material, which also feeds the black hole over time, heating it up and making it glow brightly. Regions powered by supermassive black holes in this way are called “quasars,” and the regions of their galaxies in which they reside are known as “active galactic nuclei (AGNs).”
These newly discovered black hole regions, the “red spots,” may be different from other quasars, even those JWST has already seen in the early universe. For example, black holes with red dots seem to produce much more ultraviolet light than expected. However, the most shocking thing about these supermassive black holes remains how massive they look.
“Normally, supermassive black holes pair up with galaxies,” Leja said. “They grow up together and go through all their major life experiences together. But here, we have a full-grown black hole living inside what must be a baby galaxy.
“That doesn’t make sense because these things should grow together, or so we thought.”
The red dot galaxies themselves are also surprising. They appear to be much smaller than other galaxies, despite having nearly as many stars. This means that red dot galaxies appear to consist of between 10 billion and 1 trillion stars packed into a galaxy several hundred light-years across with a volume 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.
To put this into context, if the Milky Way were to shrink to the size of one of these red dot galaxies, then the closest star to the sun (Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years away) would be within the system solar. Additionally, the distance between Earth and the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, would be reduced from 26,000 light years to just 26 light years. This would see it and its surroundings appear in the night sky above Earth.
“These early galaxies would be so dense with stars—stars that must have formed in a way we’ve never seen before, under conditions we’d never expect over a period in which we’d never expect never see them,” Leja said. “And for whatever reason, the universe stopped creating objects like these after only a few billion years. They are unique to the early universe.”
The team intends to follow up their findings with more observations of these confusing little red dots to better understand the mysteries of the dots. This will involve taking deeper spectra by pointing JWST at red objects for long periods of time to obtain spectra of light emission associated with different elements. This could help reveal the contributions of ancient stars and supermassive black holes to galaxies.
“There is another way that we can have a breakthrough, and that is only [having] the right idea”, concluded Leja. “We have all these pieces of the puzzle and they only fit if we ignore the fact that some of them are breaking. This problem lends itself to a stroke of genius that has so far eluded us, all our collaborators, and the entire scientific community.
“Honestly, it’s exciting to have so much of this mystery to figure out.”
The team’s research was published June 26 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Image Source : www.space.com