The Webb Space Telescope team is continuing the commissioning of scientific instruments, which is the last step before the start of scientific operations in the summer. We recently saw a spectacular image of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy taken by the event horizon telescope. One of the mysteries of modern astronomy is that every large galaxy has a huge central black hole, and some of these black holes have been surprisingly large even in the early days of the universe.
Roberto maiolino, a member of Weber's near infrared spectrometer (nirspec) instrument science team, explained how Weber telescope would help answer these questions:
"One of the most exciting discoveries Weber is about to open is the search for primitive black holes in the early universe. These are the seeds of more massive black holes found by astronomers in galactic nuclei. Most (possibly all) There are black holes at the center of galaxies, whose mass is millions to billions of times that of our sun. These supermassive black holes have become so large by devouring the material around them and by merging smaller black holes.
A recent interesting discovery is the discovery of a supermassive black hole, which has a mass of billions of solar masses. It existed when the universe was only about 700million years old, only a small part of its current age of 13.8 billion years. This is a puzzling result, because according to standard theory, there is not enough time to grow such a supermassive black hole in such an early age. Some people have proposed some solutions to this problem.
One possibility is that black holes, created by the death of the first generation of stars in the early universe, absorb matter at a particularly high rate. In another case, the original gas cloud has not been enriched by chemical elements heavier than helium, and can directly collapse to form a black hole with a mass of hundreds of thousands of solar masses, and then proliferate materials to evolve into a supermassive black hole observed in later times. Finally, the dense nucleon clusters in the center of infant galaxies may produce medium mass black hole seeds through stellar collisions or the merger of stellar mass black holes, and then become larger through accretion. The“
This map from the University of Cambridge shows the populations of known black holes (large black spots) and candidate black hole ancestors (shadow areas) in the early universe
"Weber is about to open up a new space for discovery in this field. It is possible that the first black hole seed was originally formed in the 'Baby Universe' in just a few million years after the big bang. Weber is a perfect 'time machine' for understanding these primitive objects. Its excellent sensitivity enables Weber to detect extremely distant galaxies, and since it takes time for the light emitted by galaxies to reach us, we will see their appearance in the distant past Sub.
Weber's nirspec instrument is particularly suitable for identifying the seeds of primitive black holes. My colleagues in the nirspec instrument science team and I will look for their characteristics in the 'active' stage, when they are greedily devouring substances and growing rapidly. At these stages, the material around them becomes very hot and glows, ionizing the atoms around them and in their host galaxy.
Nirspec will disperse the light from these systems into a spectrum, or 'Rainbow'. The rainbow of active black hole seeds will be described by a specific 'fingerprint', that is, the characteristics of highly ionized atoms. Nirspec will also measure the velocity of the gas moving near these primitive black holes. Smaller black holes will be characterized by lower orbital velocities. Black hole seeds formed in primitive clouds will be identified by the absence of features associated with any element heavier than helium.
I look forward to using Weber's unprecedented ability to search for these black hole primitives, with the ultimate goal of understanding their nature and origin. The early universe and black hole seed field is a completely unknown field. My colleagues and I are very excited to explore it with Weber. The“
-Roberto mayolino, Professor of Experimental Astrophysics at Cambridge University and director of the kavri Institute of Cosmology