Scientists have found a way to detect supermassive black holes during their formation by a specific type of radiation. The James Webb Telescope (JWST) has sufficient power to detect it.
One of the most mysterious discoveries in modern astronomy has been the discovery of supermassive black holes, some of which weigh billions of times more than our Sun, in galaxies that formed less than 750 million years after the Big Bang. Apparently, they grew at an incredible rate, challenging our understanding of how black holes form and evolve.
The traditional way to form black holes involves the collapse of a star, when a massive star dies and leaves behind black holes that are usually several times heavier than the Sun. But for these stellar remnants to become giants with masses billions of times that of the Sun in the early Universe, they would have needed to feed at an impossible rate over an exceptionally long period of time.
An alternative explanation is a scenario of direct collapse. According to this theory, the massive clouds of primordial gas that filled the early Universe collapsed directly into the embryos of supermassive black holes without forming stars.
A key requirement for the direct collapse process is maintaining the gas at a cooling temperature of atomic hydrogen of around 10,000 degrees, which prevents fragmentation that would lead to the formation of stars. Under these conditions, massive gas clouds can collapse directly into dense cores, which ultimately become the embryos of black holes.
The results of a new study published on the arXiv preprint server suggest that a special type of light called Lyman-alpha emission was emitted during the direct collapse process. It occurs when hydrogen atoms absorb and re-emit ultraviolet radiation. During direct collapse, this radiation is one of the main cooling processes, carrying away energy as the gas cloud contracts.
Previous models assumed a spherical collapse that would trap photons and destroy them through quantum processes. However, researchers propose a more realistic scenario involving rotating gas that forms an accretion disk around the central mass concentration. This creates a unique biconical “funnel” along the axis of rotation, through which radiation can escape.
Using complex computer simulations and radiation transfer calculations, scientists have discovered that a significant portion of Lyman-alpha photons can escape through these outflow channels. For an object preceding a supermassive black hole, with a redshift of 10 (when the Universe was only about 500 million years old), more than 95% of the Lyman-alpha emission could escape and potentially be detected. Modeling also showed that JWST’s instruments are quite capable of detecting these signals using multi-object spectroscopy mode and approximately 10,000 seconds of observation time.
According to scientists, if their research is confirmed by actual observations from JWST, it will radically change astrophysics, proving a scenario that until recently was considered highly exotic. The detection of direct collapse will also be an important milestone in understanding the origin of supermassive black holes, which shaped the structure of the early Universe.
Earlier, we reported on how a Nobel Prize winner urged people not to trust images of black holes obtained using neural networks.
According to Phys.org
