Artist’s Impression of Fastest-feeding Black Hole credit NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani

A team of U.S. National Science Foundation astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of an early galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang that is consuming matter at a phenomenal rate.

Indeed, the black hole appears to be consuming matter at over 40 times the theoretical limit, according to data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory

The black hole’s extreme ‘feast’ could help astronomers at the NOIRLab explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early Universe.

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the Universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly, but now we have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of that rapid growth.

LID-568 was discovered by a team led by International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who examined a sample of galaxies from the Chandra COSMOS legacy survey. The galaxies are very bright in the X-ray part of the spectrum, but are invisible in the optical and near-infrared. JWST’s unique infrared sensitivity allows it to detect these faint counterpart emissions.

The black hole stood out within the sample for its intense X-ray emission, but its exact position could not be determined from the X-ray observations alone. So, rather than using traditional slit spectroscopy, scientists suggested that Suh’s team use the integral field spectrograph on JWST’s NIRSpec—an instrument that can get a spectrum for each pixel in the instrument’s field of view rather than being limited to a narrow slice.

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“Owing to its faint nature, the detection of LID-568 would be impossible without JWST. Using the integral field spectrograph was innovative and necessary for getting our observation,” says Emanuele Farina, International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer and co-author of the research.

JWST’s NIRSpec allowed the team to get a full view of their target and its surrounding region, leading to the unexpected and stunning discovery of powerful outflows of gas around the central black hole.

The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that it’s a single episode of rapid accretion. “This serendipitous result added a new dimension to our understanding of the system and opened up exciting avenues for investigation,” says Suh.

“This black hole is having a feast,” says Julia Scharwächter International Gemini Observatory and NOIRLab astronomer and co-author. “This extreme case shows that a fast-feeding mechanism above the Eddington limit is one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the Universe.”

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The Eddington limit relates to the maximum luminosity that a black hole can achieve, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.

When LID-568’s luminosity was calculated to be so much higher than theoretically possible, the team knew they had something remarkable in their data.

These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole ‘seeds’, which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the Universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.

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“The discovery of a super-Eddington accreting black hole suggests that a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” says Suh.

The discovery, published in a paper in Nature Astronomy, provides the first opportunity for astronomers to study how a black hole can exceed its Eddington limit.

It’s possible that the powerful outflows observed in LID-568 may be acting as a release valve for the excess energy generated by the extreme accretion, preventing the system from becoming too unstable. To further investigate the mechanisms at play, the team is planning follow-up observations with JWST.

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