![]() ![]() 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." ![]() "First, you need to start growing from a massive 'seed' black hole. (NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)"To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied," Wang explained in a statement. Since quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, questions remain about what fuels their rapid growth.Īrtist's depiction of the James Webb Space Telescope. There are at least eight quasars at the center of JWST's ASPIRE project that formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The findings are part of a bigger mission for JWST to study the early universe- which includes understanding the underpinnings of the earliest galaxies, and the birth of black holes. "ASPIRE (A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era) aims to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure." "The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves," said team member Joseph Hennawi of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The astronomers believe these "unprecedented observations" will not only provide important insights into the early universe by better understanding a young string of the cosmic web, but also how black holes "assembled." The team of astronomers believe that the invisible string of galaxies recently observed by JWST will evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies, like the well-known Coma Cluster. Earlier this year, scientists found the first evidence of shockwaves rippling through the cosmic web. This observation adds on to piling research around the cosmic web. Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist. "I expected to find something, but I didn't expect such a long, distinctly thin structure." "I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is," said one of the authors, Xiaohui Fan, in a statement. But this is the first time astronomers have observed the early formation of the cosmic web in a formation that's fastened by a quasar. Astronomers have observed thousands of quasars at far away distances from our galaxy. A quasar is an active galactic nucleus that is believed to be energized by a supermassive black hole. As Fang noted, this early string of galaxies is anchored by a luminous quasar. JWST has given astronomers the opportunity to peer back in time and observe the very faint, dim objects that existed shortly after the Big Bang. "This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar," said Feige Wang, an assistant research professor at the University of Arizona Steward Observatory and lead author of one of the two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters detailing the discovery. ![]() The James Webb Telescope has already found previously-undetected water on a distant planet ![]()
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