Astronomers observed ancient quasars that appear to be surprisingly alone in the early universe. The findings challenge physicists' understanding of how such luminous objects could have formed so early on in the universe, without a significant source of surrounding matter to fuel their growth.
The quasars appear to have few cosmic neighbors, raising questions about how they first emerged more than 13 billion years agoAstronomers observed ancient quasars that appear to be surprisingly alone in the early universe. The findings challenge physicists' understanding of how such luminous objects could have formed so early on in the universe, without a significant source of surrounding matter to fuel their growth.
The astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to peer back in time, more than 13 billion years, to study the cosmic surroundings of five known ancient quasars. They found a surprising variety in their neighborhoods, or"quasar fields." While some quasars reside in very crowded fields with more than 50 neighboring galaxies, as all models predict, the remaining quasars appear to drift in voids, with only a few stray galaxies in their vicinity.
There is a possibility that these quasars may not be as solitary as they appear, but are instead surrounded by galaxies that are heavily shrouded in dust and therefore hidden from view. Eilers and her colleagues hope to tune their observations to try and see through any such cosmic dust, in order to understand how quasars grew so big, so fast, in the early universe.
The telescope also took measurements of light in multiple wavelengths across each quasar's field, which the team then processed to determine whether a given object in the field was light from a neighboring galaxy, and how far a galaxy is from the much more luminous central quasar. "The cosmic web of dark matter is a solid prediction of our cosmological model of the Universe, and it can be described in detail using numerical simulations," says co-author says Elia Pizzati, a graduate student at Leiden University."By comparing our observations to these simulations, we can determine where in the cosmic web quasars are located."
The team's findings may raise more questions than answers. The"lonely" quasars appear to live in relatively empty regions of space. If physicists' cosmological models are correct, these barren regions signify very little dark matter, or starting material for brewing up stars and galaxies. How, then, did extremely bright and massive quasars come to be?
Astrophysics Astronomy Galaxies Big Bang Cosmology Dark Matter Cosmic Rays
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