Galaxies in the universe gather into clusters and interconnected filamentary structures with voids in between, forming the “cosmic web”. Over time, gravity draws matter together, making the filamentary structures more distinct.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found a thread-like arrangement of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The structure, which is 3 million light-years long, has a luminous quasar at its core. A quasar is a galaxy with an active, supermassive black hole. The team believes that the filament will eventually evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies, much like the well-known Coma Cluster in the nearby universe.
Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said,
“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is. I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure.”
Feige Wang of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the principal investigator of this program, noted:
“This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar.”
The ASPIRE project aims to study the earliest black holes’ cosmic environments. They will observe 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years after the big bang, a time known as the Epoch of Reionization. This discovery is part of the project.
The study also investigates the properties of eight quasars in the young universe. The team confirmed that their central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the big bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass of our Sun. Astronomers are trying to find evidence to explain how these black holes could grow so large so fast.
To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied. First, you need to start growing from a massive ‘seed’ black hole. Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime.
The observations provide important clues about how black holes are assembled. These black holes are situated in massive young galaxies that provide the fuel for their growth.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope also provided the best evidence yet of how early supermassive black holes potentially regulate the formation of stars in their galaxies. While supermassive black holes accrete matter, they also can power tremendous outflows of material. These winds can extend far beyond the black hole itself, on a galactic scale, and can have a significant impact on the formation of stars.
“Strong winds from black holes can suppress the formation of stars in the host galaxy. Such winds have been observed in the nearby universe but have never been directly observed in the Epoch of Reionization. The scale of the wind is related to the structure of the quasar. In the Webb observations, we are seeing that such winds existed in the early universe.”
These results were published in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29.
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James Webb Space Telescope identifies the earliest strands of the cosmic web via NASA with usage type - Public DomainFeatured Image Credit
James Webb Space Telescope identifies the earliest strands of the cosmic web via NASA with usage type - Public Domain
