Black Hole Discovery Creates 'Chicken-or-Egg' Problem for Astrophysicists

The discovery of two black holes hosted by a pair of ancient galaxies has created a "chicken-or-egg" problem for astrophysicists.

New images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured starlight from two galaxies—which host the actively growing black holes—fewer than a billion years after the Big Bang.

The study's findings, published in Nature on June 28, show that these black holes and their host galaxies are billions of times larger than our sun. The galaxies measure 130 to 34 billion times the mass of our sun, while gas measurements suggest the black holes measure 1.4 and 0.2 billion times the mass of our star.

"This may not be a surprise for us because we performed data simulations before JWST launch to select these two galaxies as the best targets to detect quasar host galaxies in the early universe," co-lead author of the study, Masafusa Onoue, told Newsweek.

The findings present the question of what came first—the black holes or their host galaxies. It is not dissimilar to "what came first, the chicken or the egg," according to a press release on the study.

"Our sample of faint distant quasars from the Subaru Telescope is the key to the presented discovery. One thing that we were indeed surprised at is that we see the dim host galaxy not only in the JWST images but also in the spectrum data of JWST for one target. Much more discoveries are awaited because we have 10 more targets to go in this Cycle 1 program," Onoue said.

It is not clear how these black holes got so big, especially when the universe was born fewer than a billion years prior. In terms of the universe, this is not a large amount of time.

Although scientists do not know the exact age of the universe, it is estimated to be around 13 billion years old.

This first-of-is-kind finding has presented more questions than answers for the research team, which is made up of international researchers led by Japan Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021, is a NASA space telescope that conducts infrared astronomy.

It is the largest optical telescope in space and is able to pick up images from extremely old, distant objects.

It is equipped to pick up things that the Hubble Space Telescope—which launched in 1990 into low Earth orbit—cannot decipher.

Black holes appear luminous in their images, but galaxies can be hard to view. Before the James Webb Telescope was in operation, researchers found it difficult to make findings such as this one.

The Hubble Space Telescope is able to detect galaxies at a time when the university was around 3 billion years old, but no younger.

Researchers found that the ratios of the black holes' size to their host galaxies is similar to those observed more recently.

This suggests that the link between the two was already established 860 million years after the Big Bang.

The lead authors of the study, Project Researcher Xuheng Ding, Professor John Silverman, and Onoue, are continuing to look into these findings using large samples from the telescope.

"Our immediate next step is to derive statistically stronger evidence of the non-evolving relationship between the mass of black holes and the mass of galaxies over the cosmic time," Onoue said. "Also, we are interested in detailed properties of the host galaxies such as the breakdown of the stellar population in a quasar host galaxy and the location of these massive quasar-hosting galaxies in the large-scale structure of the universe."

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Update 6/29/23, 3:01 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include quotes from Masafusa Onoue.