Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to discover a 3 million light-year-long strand of galaxies that formed just 830 million years after the big bang. The filament is one of the earliest structures of the cosmic web, the network of galaxies that fills the universe.
The filament is anchored by a quasar, a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core that emits intense radiation. The quasar is one of eight that the astronomers studied, finding that their black holes range from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass of the Sun.
The findings, published in Nature, shed light on how galaxies and black holes evolved in the young universe, and how they are connected by the cosmic web.
“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is. I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure,” said Xiaohui Fan, a team member from the University of Arizona.
“This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar,” added Feige Wang, the principal investigator of the project, also from the University of Arizona.
The team believes that the filament will eventually grow into a massive cluster of galaxies, much like the well-known Coma Cluster in the nearby universe.
The discovery is part of the ASPIRE project (A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era), which aims to study the cosmic environments of the earliest black holes.
“The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves. ASPIRE aims to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure,” explained Joseph Hennawi, a team member from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
One of the mysteries that ASPIRE hopes to solve is how these early black holes became so enormous in such a short time.
“To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied. First, you need to start growing from a massive ‘seed’ black hole. Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime,” said Wang.
“The discovery of this filament is exciting because it provides us with an opportunity to study how galaxies and their central black holes evolve in these large-scale structures,” said Jinyi Yang, another team member from the University of Arizona.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project of NASA, ESA and CSA. It was launched in December 2022 and began its scientific observations in June 2023. It is designed to observe some of the most distant and faintest objects in the universe, using infrared light.
Relevant articles:
– NASA’s Webb Identifies the Earliest Strands of the Cosmic Web, NASA, June 29, 2023
– NASA’s Webb detects 3 million light-year-long cosmic filament, Interesting Engineering, June 30, 2023
– Webb Space Telescope Illuminates Earliest Strands of the Cosmic Web, SciTechDaily, July 8, 2023
– NASA’s Webb Identifies the Earliest Strands of the Cosmic Web, Webb Telescope, June 29, 2023