It is by far the oldest black hole ever discovered, it was already there, some 500 million years after the Big Bang, it is huge (10 million times the mass of the Sun); and normally it has nothing to do there. We will have to review and above all rewrite the history of the genesis of our Universe.
A gigantic archaic black hole is tearing through space at full speed, NASA announced on Friday (April 7th). Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, explains to us that it is the oldest black hole discovered. It was already there some 500 million years ago.
franceinfo: The James Webb Space Telescope observed a gigantic black hole that has no place where it is. Explain to us…
Herve Poirier: Black holes are seen more and more in the sky. Not directly of course: these stars are so dense that even light cannot escape. But indirectly, one discerns better and better the effect of their formidable attraction on the surrounding matter. Well, this one is the oldest ever observed: it was already there, in the heart of its galaxy, 570 million years after the Big Bang.
The Hubble Space Telescope had already spotted this very distant galaxy, one of the brightest in the early Universe, but it was unable to discern what is inside. The James Webb telescope was able to see that this galaxy hides a black hole 10 million times the mass of the Sun, almost 3 times more than the one that sits at the center of our galaxy. However, normally, this giga monster has nothing to do there.
Why, then ?
In the story of the Universe as astrophysicists tell it, it takes time for supermassive black holes to form at the center of a galaxy. First stars have to be born, then they have to die, for lack of fuel, they have to collapse under the effect of their own weight, and these little black holes have to come together, clump together and merge until to become a single gigantic black hole. Except it doesn’t work here: 570 million years isn’t enough to form such a monster.
So there is something wrong with the story?
Astrophysicists are delighted: with the Webb telescope, they were hoping to see surprising things, which challenge their models. It starts with this black hole: we will have to invoke exotic processes to explain its formation. A sudden collapse of a gas cloud without going through the star stage? The existence of ultra-massive stars?
But they are also studying other bizarre data, on the galaxies of the primordial Universe, which seem too big, too bright, too loaded with stars. James Webb was designed, among other things, to understand the genesis of the Universe. And that’s it, a year and a half after its launch, it begins to get to the heart of the matter.