Such a bizarre quasar proves that active black holes gorging themselves and growing does not instantly extinguish star birth. “The detection of CQ4479 in the SOFIA far-infrared observations gave us the confirmation we needed to say that this was a cold quasar.” “Cold quasars are weird because they still host star-formation at the same time, and to confirm that stars were still forming, we needed far-infrared data from SOFIA,” Kevin Cooke, who led a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, told SYFY WIRE. This is why its black hole is called a “cold quasar.” This galaxy is an anomaly because quasars indulging in a feeding frenzy usually heat up the rest of the galaxy to the point that atoms and molecules are flying around everywhere and nothing can settle long enough to condense into an astral embryo. ![]() Now scientists have discovered CQ 4479, a galaxy birthing so many stars, so fast, that the supermassive black hole at its center can’t engulf the energy from them fast enough.ĬQ 4479 was found by NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) infrared telescope. Past that point of no return, anything devoured by the black hole supposedly vanishes forever. Dust and gas from stars are pulled into a black hole’s accretion disc by its monstrous gravity and begin the slow spiral towards its event horizon. When black holes are feasting on stars, they turn into quasars that glow brighter than anything in the universe. “In order for the black hole to have grown to the size we see with J0313-1806, it would have to have started out with a seed black hole of at least 10,000 solar masses, and that would only be possible in the direct collapse scenario.There is nothing black holes love more than star stuff, but one galaxy is spawning stars faster than the supermassive black hole lurking at its core can eat them. “Once you go to lower redshifts, all the models could explain the existence of those less distant and less massive quasars,” Fan said. “In this case, one that involves vast quantities of primordial, cold hydrogen gas directly collapsing into a seed black hole.”īecause that mechanism does not require mature stars for raw material, team members say it’s the only model that can explain a 1.6-billion-solar-mass black hole when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age. “This tells you that no matter what you do, the seed of this black hole must have formed by a different mechanism,” said co-author Xiaohui Fan, Regents Professor and associate head of the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. ![]() Wang and his colleagues calculated that if the quasar’s black hole formed as early as 100 million years after the Big Bang and then grew as fast as possible, it would have had to start out with a mass of 10,000 suns to reach its current size. Another model suggest supermassive black holes can be formed when dense star clusters collapse, directly forming a massive black hole.īut the newly discovered quasar, known as J0313-1806, features a black hole that’s too young and too massive to be explained by earlier theories. One theory about early black hole evolution holds that massive first-generation consisting mostly of hydrogen explode in supernova blasts, leaving behind already massive black holes that consume surrounding material and growing rapidly in the process. “Black holes created by the very first massive stars could not have grown this large in only a few hundred million years,” said Feige Wang, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Arizona and lead author of a paper on the discovery accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The quasar’s supermassive black hole, some 1.6 billion times as massive as the Sun, is the youngest on record, posing a challenge to theorists trying to explain how black holes could have grown so massive so early in cosmic history. da SilvaĪstronomers have found the most distant quasar yet discovered, a powerhouse seen shining just 670 million years after the Big Bang. ![]() An artist’s impression of quasar J0313-1806, the most distant yet discovered, powered by the youngest known supermassive black hole.
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