These Black Holes Are So Ancient They Shouldn't Even Exist
Ancient quasars seen by the James Webb Space Telescope technically shouldn't exist, but one rare type of dark matter could make sense of that.
Ultra-self-interacting dark matter are supposedly enormous masses that collapsed in on themselves and created the supermassive black holes in these quasars.
Scientists formulated a mathematical model to help explain the mysterious quasars was used to predict the masses and other properties of better known quasars, aiding in understanding the earliest supermassive black holes.
Able to see into the far reaches of the universe, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) glimpsed quasars so distant and ancient that it took tens of billions of years just for their light to reach Earth. There's just one problem: they aren't supposed to exist.
Formed only 800 million years after the Big Bang (a cosmic blink of an eye), the quasars (incredibly luminous objects fueled by supermassive black holes) observed by Webb are from an epoch supposedly too early for supermassive black holes to even form. These active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are at least a billion times more massive than the Sun. How they were able to grow to such masses when the universe was still in its infancy is an enigma, but it might involve dark matter.
Led by physicist and doctoral student Grant Roberts, a team of researchers from U.C. Santa Cruz tried using different theories to explain how these monstrous black holes formed. From the collapse of the ever-elusive Pop III stars, the first stars to appear in the void, to galactic mergers, none of these theories fit well enough. Then Roberts proposed that they could have come into being from ultra-self-interacting dark matter.
Dark matter has not yet been directly detected. If ultra-self-interacting dark matter (uSIDM) exists, it makes up only a small percentage of all dark matter in the universe. Particles of uSIDM are thought to have strong interactions with each other that cause them to travel towards galactic centers and form gobs of dark matter. These interactions also redistribute the mass in the core so its central density decreases while its size increases. Core expansion then turns into core collapse. Once the core can get no larger, it grows more and more dense until the extreme gravity causes it to collapse.
'If this collapse occurs early enough in the halos' evolution, it can provide seeds for the formation of early [supermassive black holes] of adequate mass and [distance],' Roberts and his team said in a study recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The supermassive black holes formed from those seeds would then keep growing from the constant accretion of material, and the gravitational forces of black holes this massive are so strong that they will pull in anything that crosses a certain threshold. The more it consumes, the more energy it emits, and some quasars can shine with the light of hundreds of trillions of Suns.
To test if the theory was viable, the researchers created a mathematical model of the formation of uSIDM black holes and compared that model to observations of other quasars that were previously discovered and better understood. When used on the known quasars, the model, which presents the interaction strength of uSIDM particles as dependent on their velocity, succeeded in predicting their masses and other properties.
Having these results lends more credibility to the model—and the existence of ultra-self-interacting dark matter. The researchers think it could mean that those hypothetical gobs of uSIDM might actually have formed the earliest supermassive black holes in the nascent universe.
'With the advent of JWST, more extremely [distant] quasars are being discovered,' they said in the same study. 'Combining such measurements with the similarly growing population of [closer] quasars would allow us to place more stringent constraints on the formation and accretion timescales of the seeds.'
The possibility of supermassive black holes coming into being from a rare form of dark matter just might have shed a little more light on the darkness that surrounds it.
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