A group of researchers discovered supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies when the Universe was much younger, 6 billion years after the Big Bang. The scientists are led by the Spanish Mar Mezcua, and the publication was made in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
So far, as scientists point out, very few cases have been discovered in the current Universe, some 13.6 gigayears after the Big Bang.
black holes, As NASA explains, are astronomical objects with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them.
“The ‘surface’ of a black hole, called the event horizon, defines the limit where the speed required to evade it exceeds the speed of light, which is the speed limit in the cosmos.” adds the North American aerospace agency.
The study sample features seven dwarf galaxies more distant than in most cases, between 10 and 6 billion years after the Big Bang, the event that gave birth to the Universe.
The contribution of the finding on black holes
“What has surprised”, highlights Mar Mezcua it’s a statement, “is that its mass is consistent with the mass of supermassive black holes, since they have 10 million and 100 million times the mass of the Sun.”
Mezcua is a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).
The discovery suggests that black holes have grown faster than their host galaxies. The researchers posit that, over time, these galaxies will grow until their mass matches that of the black hole they host.
This finding has implications for our understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes, such as the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” emphasizes Mezcua.
With telescopes like DESI or LSST, of more recent generation, more even more distant dwarf galaxies will be able to be detected, to continue investigating the evolution of black holes from their origins to becoming supermassive.