Using a powerful combination of the Subaru Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered seven supermassive black hole-powered quasars surrounded by veils of dust that existed when the universe was less than a billion years old.
Supermassive black holes consuming vast amounts of matter and shining as bright quasars while being hidden in thick clouds of dust have long been suspected to exist at an early period in the 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos called “Cosmic Dawn,” but have proved frustratingly elusive.
This is the first detection of hidden but bright quasars in the early universe. It indicates that quasars could actually be twice as common at Cosmic Dawn as previously suspected, researchers said.
“This discovery was only possible with the unique combination of two powerful telescopes,” team leader Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan said in a statement.
“The Subaru Telescope’s wide and sensitive survey allowed us to spot rare, luminous galaxies, and JWST was able to catch the faint infrared light from the hidden quasars,” Matsuoka added. “This shows how effective the approach of ‘discover with Subaru Telescope, explore with JWST’ can be.”
Quasars at Cosmic Dawn
Supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun sit at the heart of all galaxies in the modern universe. Not all of these black holes are equal, however. Some, like the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), are quiet because they are not feeding on matter surrounding them.
Others are greedily consuming matter that surrounds them in a flattened, swirling cloud called an accretion disk. The immense gravity of these black holes causes tidal forces in this material that generate intense friction, heating gas and dust in the disk to temperatures as great as millions of degrees. Meanwhile, matter in the disk is channeled to the poles of the supermassive black hole by powerful magnetic fields, from where it is blasted out as near-light-speed jets.
Both of these processes radiate vast amounts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum that appear to astronomers from great distances as quasars.
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