Hubble's first discovery of a super massive black hole, born about 750 million years ago, may have found a missing link

Theory and computer simulation has long been predicted that in dusty the rapid growth of black holes exist in the early universe galaxies, stars can form in the galaxy, but the black hole is a process called GNz7q confirmed for the first time, or could help scientists find star-forming galaxies in the early and the first "missing link" between the super massive black hole.

How do super massive black holes grow so fast?

According to popular models of the universe, a black hole is used by a gigantic star. When you do here not have much fuel, sometimes it's caused by a supernova, sometimes it's caused by a supernova, and it's called a direct collapse scenario. Once the star does not have ample fuel to burn, it can no longer support its mass and collapses. If the star is massive enough, it will fall into an object with so much gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape from it -- a black hole. As the black hole gradually pulls more and more dust and gas from its vicinity, it will grow in size and may eventually form a super massive black hole.

However, scientists have discovered that in the early universe (when the universe was only 700 million years old) there were already many super massive black holes about a billion times the mass of the Sun, surrounded by falling disks of matter and glowing so brightly that we could detect them across vast distances of space and time. At that moment in the history of the universe, the universe was a baby. Gravity was just beginning to control clouds of gas and dark matter to form the structures that later evolved into full-fledged spiral and elliptical galaxies. Stars began to emerge, but there were much fewer of them than there are today.

With the way black holes form and grow, the universe simply would not have been able around long enough for black holes to reach a billion solar masses. So how did such colossal black holes emerge so quickly in the history of the universe?

So far, about a super massive black hole formation theory suggests that there are two, one is that it happened in a very fast speed form the core of the stars of the galaxy's dust cloud -- known as "star suddenly and violently (Starburst)" galaxy, the other is the ancient quasars gave birth to the seed of super massive black holes in the black hole - 10000 solar masses.

Starburst galaxies are generally defined as galaxies that form stars so fast (about 10 to the third times as fast as normal galaxies) that they form thousands of new stars every year. Although starburst galaxies are rare today, astronomers have found that they were very common in the early universe.

So why do starburst galaxies form when the rate of new star formation in our own Milky Way galaxy is relatively slow? The most prevalent theory is that a galaxy enters a starburst phase when it has a close encounter with another galaxy. Gravitational interactions send shockwaves through huge clouds of gas, causing them to enter into and form star-forming regions. These create some of the largest stars in the universe -- monster stars with more than 100 solar masses.

These massive stars are short-lived and explode as supernovas, releasing more shock waves into the Milky Way. This will create a chain reaction, cascading through the galaxy. Within millions of years, the Milky Way is forming stars at tens or even hundreds of times the normal rate of galaxy formation. Then when the gas is out, in about 10 million years, the star formation period is over.

Astronomers have discovered thousands of starburst galaxies in the universe, and one of the most famous is M82, which is about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The Hubble Space Telescope imaged the Milky Way in 2005 and found 197 immense star-forming clusters occurring simultaneously in the starburst core, and that the changes in M82 were driven by its gravitational interaction with the nearby M81 galaxy.

Fast-growing black holes are 'forerunners' of super massive black holes?

Depending on Hubble data, GNz7q existed only 750 million years after the Big Bang. And the analysis suggests that GNz7q is the earliest example of a rapidly growing black hole in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy, close in age to the earliest known super massive black holes in the universe.

Meanwhile, scientists have discovered that GNz7q has two properties: Starburst galaxies and quasars, in which the light of a quasar shows the reddish color of dust. The object also seems to be missing some features typically seen in highly luminous quasars, suggesting an accretion disk around a super massive black hole. This implies that the growing black hole is still at a low mass stage, but its behavior and environment match the predictions of the simulation.

In addition, GNz7q's host galaxy is forming stars at a rate of 1,600 solar masses per year, and GNz7q itself appears bright at ultraviolet wavelengths but very faint at X-ray wavelengths.

In general, the accretion disk of a gigantic black hole should look very lively in both ultraviolet and X-ray light. Nevertheless, this time, although the team detected ultraviolet light with Hubble, the x-rays was not visible even using one of the deepest X-ray datasets. These results suggest that the core of the accretion disk of X-ray origin is still obscure. And the outside of the accretion disk, where the UV light is from, is becoming clear. The explanation is that GNz7q is a rapidly growing black hole still obscured by the dusty core of its star-forming host galaxy.

All in all, the GNz7q discovery provides a precursor to the super massive black holes we will observe at a later stage. Once the James Webb Space Telescope is constantly running, we'll know just how widespread these fast-growing black holes really are.