NASA’s Webb telescope spotted an active supermassive black hole that existed 570 million years after the Big Bang. That’s really early.
NASA’s Webb telescope spotted an active supermassive black hole that existed 570 million years after the Big Bang. That’s really early.
It could prove that in the near beginning, just after the big-bang, massive stars initially formed, and lived very short lives of a few million years. That would explain the early formation of supermassive black holes like this. Smaller dwarf starts like ours could be the product of several billion years of star life and evolution.
That is one theory for what we see. The trick is figuring out whether this is an anomaly or typical of the early universe and determining what mechanism could have led to it happening (whether rare or common). (edit: though notably, theoretical Pop III stars are still only on the order of 100s of stellar masses, not million, so these SMBHs are almost certainly not collapsed Pop IIIs)
Population III stars are speculated to have been very big indeed. And very short-lived because of their near-0 metalicity. But current models do not have them nearly big enough to explain early SMBHs like this. That’s why these observations are so interesting.
Could be that we just haven’t observed enough. Isn’t it true that the further we look back the narrower our observations?
What do you mean by “narrower”?
The universe was much smaller as we go back in time, so things that are far away are being relatively scaled up compared to their distance in what can only be described as “confusing as fuck to wrap your head around.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/the-cosmic-magnifying-lens/
What I mean is the smaller the window the less you see of the bigger picture. Say I look at the Hubble Deep Field image. I see a lot of galaxies, however that field of view only encompasses mere fraction of what is observable. So sure, the further you look out, the further you look back, yet the further you look out the less you see the overall picture.
But you are also looking at a universe that was much more compact then, with galaxies and structures bunched much closer together than now. It may be a narrow field of vision compared to the current size of the universe, but that narrow field of vision has also expanded in the subsequent 13+ billion years.
Super massive black holes aren’t formed from stars. Stars have a maximum mass limit due to radiation pressure from energy generated in their core pushing up and out on their upper layers, and that limit is in the hundreds of solar masses range, not the millions that define a super massive black hole.
Seems NASA postulates that there is or was such a thing as mid-sized black holes that are created by the collision of massive stars in clusters…then these merge to form a SMB.
The collapse of star clusters is one hypothesis for the creation of intermediate mass black holes, yes, but those aren’t predicated on any actual stars forming. Stars just form as a matter of course.
Stellar mass black holes generally require core-collapse supernovae - which require massive stars - in order to compress the core enough to trigger black hole formation. That isn’t true for these larger types of black holes.
Those initial Population III stars do not have the same size limitation as current, metal-rich stars. Those things were short-lived gargantuan monsters compared to any and all subsequent stars.