BLACK HOLE

Astronomers have discovered the second quasar J1007 + 2115, the second most remote from the Sun, which existed at a time when the age of the Universe was 700 million years. The quasar contains an anomalously massive black hole with a mass of 1.5 billion solar masses, the fact of which requires a revision of existing theories of the formation and growth of supermassive black holes.

One of the important problems of modern astrophysics is the explanation of the nature of supermassive black holes that are found in the central regions of many galaxies. There is no universally accepted theory of the formation of such objects, it is assumed that they can be the result of intense accretion of matter onto a black hole of stellar mass or the collapse of a dense star cluster or supermassive star. To understand what the "nuclei" of black holes were in the early Universe, and to evaluate their growth rate, astronomers look for very distant quasars, which are the nuclei of active galaxies.

A group of astronomers led by Jinyi Yang from the Arizona University Steward Observatory reports of the discovery of the second quasar J1007 + 2115, called Pōniuāʻena, the second most remote from the Sun. Translated from Hawaiian, it means "an unprecedented rotating source of creation, surrounded by radiance." This discovery is the result of many years of observation on the program for searching for far quasars, which uses telescopes from the Gemini, Keck, Inter-American Observatory Cerro Tololo, Magellan telescopes and the ALMA radio telescope system, as well as archival data from ground-based surveys DECaLS, UHS, Pan-STARRS1 and the WISE space telescope.

Analysis of observational data showed that the redshift value for J1007 + 2115, equal to 7.515, corresponds to the age of the Universe of 700 million years, which means that the quasar existed in the era of Reionization, when the first galaxies and stars formed. The mass of the central black hole, estimated from spectroscopic observations, is (1.5 ± 0.2) × 109 solar masses. It is twice as massive as the supermassive black hole found in the farthest known quasar J1342 + 0928.

Such a black hole does not fit well into existing theories, since it requires an abnormally massive “embryo” with a mass of ten thousand solar masses, which was supposed to form one hundred million years after the Big Bang. Such a scenario requires either the formation of a “nucleus” as a result of direct collapse of a massive object, or a very fast growth rate of a black hole due to accretion of matter. Thus, this discovery allows us to obtain the strongest constraint on the model of the early stages of the growth of supermassive black holes that need to be revised.

Previously, astronomers were able to determine the quasar with the largest luminosity of the known, which existed at a time when the age of the universe was a little more than a billion years.