A black hole has been discovered in a food coma

Gas. That’s what’s for lunch, at least that was the case with the black hole in the early universe, which had to take a break after overeating about 13 billion years ago.

The black hole is 400 million times the mass of the Sun, as seen by the modern Webb Space Telescope. distant light sources According to a team of astronomers who studied the black hole, it is essentially dormant despite its young age positing conventional models of black hole growth, the researchers published their findings today Nature.

“Although this black hole is dormant, its sheer size allowed us to detect it,” said Ignas Joodzbalis, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology and lead author of the university’s study. release. “Its dormant state also allowed us to learn about the host galaxy’s mass. The early universe managed to create some absolute monsters, even in relatively small galaxies.”

Black holes are thought to form from collapsed stars, and their intense gravitational fields accumulate material around them. The material orbiting the black hole is called an accretion disk. Sometimes, material falls into the black hole’s open snout, producing a brilliant flash of light . how does a black hole feed.

Black hole accretion disks are full of clues for astronomers who want to better understand how objects from which light cannot escape grow into the densest and most massive entities in the universe, a group published a study on a star in 2021 stuck in a loop of destruction with a black hole. In 2022, another team saw a black hole remove a star years after eating it.This year, a group determined that the fastest-growing black hole consumes one sun per day and individual team predicted accurately The Black Hole Snack Timeline Our Sun is 50 million times the mass at a distance of about 860 million light years from Earth.

There are two fundamental differences between that snack black hole and the one recently studied in the Webb data the essence of the matter. a recently studied black hole almost does not eat, changing previously held ideas about the evolution of black holes.

“It is possible that black holes are ‘born big,’ which could explain why Webb has observed massive black holes in the early universe,” said study co-author Roberto Maiolino, a researcher at the Kavli Institute and the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. release “But another possibility is that they go through periods of hyperactivity followed by periods of prolonged sleepiness.”

The idea is that black holes rapidly accumulate material and briefly exceed their predicted size limit. The gravitational behemoths then settle and rest for about 100 million years before spinning off more from space.

Black holes are difficult objects to study. In addition to their extreme physics, there’s the obvious problem that they don’t emit light. Fortunately, studying the shadows of objects and their effects on the surrounding matter, including the accretion disk, allows astronomers to build better models simulating the most extreme physics the universe has to offer.