… Invisible rotating creation fountain, surrounded by brilliance.
The newly discovered quasar is formally designated J1007 + 2115. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous name, created by 30 Hawaiian immersion school teachers during a workshop led by the A Hua He Inoa group, part of the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center - a center for education in astronomy and culture - in Hilo, Hawaii.
The brilliance of the quasar suggests its enormously massive monstrous central black hole. Consider the 4 of our Milky Way million solar mass black hole again, in contrast to Poniua'ena 1.5 billion black hole solar mass. Consider a million seconds is approximately 12 days, while a billion seconds is 31 years. So you can see, perhaps, that this distant quasar and its black hole are truly colossal.
Poniua'ena is one of only two known quasars from the same early period in the history of our universe. The statement from the University of Arizona, whose astronomers led the discovery, explained:
The supermassive black hole that feeds Poniua'ena makes this quasar the most distant object, and therefore the oldest known object in the universe that houses a black hole that exceeds one billion solar masses. According to a new study documenting the quasar's discovery, it took Poniua'ena light 13.02 billion years to reach Earth, beginning its journey just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
A scientific description of the discovery is now available through arXiv and will be published in the peer review. Astrophysical charts. The study introduces a mystery about this quasar, which is ... how could such a massive black hole have formed at such an early time in the history of our universe? Lead author Jinyi Yang of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona said:
It is the first monster of this type that we know of. The time was too short for it to grow from a small black hole to the enormous size we see.
Co-author Xiaohui Fan, also from the Steward Observatory, said:
This discovery presents the greatest challenge to the theory of black hole formation and growth in the early universe.
His statement explained:
The notion that a Poniua'ena proportional black hole could have evolved from a much smaller black hole formed by the collapse of a single star in such a short time since the Big Bang is almost impossible, according to cosmological models current.
Instead, the study authors suggest that the quasar would have had to start as a 'seed' black hole that already contains the equivalent mass of 10,000 soles already 100 million years after the Big Bang.
Read more about how this quasar was discovered, from UA
The discovery of a quasar from the dawn of the cosmos provides researchers with a rare glimpse of a time when the universe was still young and very different from what we see today, the researchers said.
Current theory suggests that at the beginning of the universe, after the Big Bang, atoms were too distant from each other to interact and form stars and galaxies. The birth of stars and galaxies as we know them occurred during the Age of Reionization, some 400 million years after the Big Bang. Fan said:
As a result of the Big Bang, the universe was very cold, because there were still no stars; without light. The first stars and galaxies appeared between 300 and 400 million years ago, and began to heat the universe.
His statement further explained:
Under the influence of heating, the hydrogen molecules were stripped of electrons in a process known as ionization. This process lasted only a few hundred million years, the blink of an eye on the life of the universe, and is the subject of ongoing research.
The discovery of quasars like Poniua'ena, deep in the reionization era, is a great step towards understanding the reionization process and the formation of the first supermassive black holes and massive galaxies. Poniua'ena has placed major new constraints on the evolution of matter between galaxies, known as the intergalactic medium, during the reionization era.
Added fan:
It appears that this quasar was detected right at the midpoint of that period, and the fact that we can observe these objects helps us to refine what happened during that period.
Artist's concept of the Poniua'ena quasar formation, which begins with a seed black hole 100 million years after the Big Bang (left), then grows to a billion solar masses 700 million years after the Big Bang (right). Image via the International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld / UANews.
Bottom line: Astronomers have just announced the discovery of the most massive quasar ever known in the early universe. Its monstrous central black hole has a mass equivalent to 1.5 trillion of our suns. The object has been given the Hawaiian name Poniua'ena.
Source: Poniua'ena: A Luminous z = 7.5 Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole
Via University of Arizona
