NAOJ A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the mother lode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars. The universe is full of supermassive black holes, monstrous versions of the humble, everyday black hole, containing masses that are millions or billions of times that of our sun. These huge cosmic beasts generate mammoth gravitational effects, so you often find supermassive black holes hiding out at the center of galaxies, orbited by billions of stars. That's exactly what happens in our home galaxy of the Milky Way. To find them lurking out in the distant parts of the universe, you need to study the light of accreting gases that swirl around them. Because we can't see a black hole, but we can see the light, we designate these powerful light sources "quasars." Down the eyepiece of a telescope they might look more like stars -- they are extremely bright -- but scientists mostly believe their light comes from gases falling toward a black hole. The Japanese team turned the ultra-powerful Hyper Suprime-Cam, mounted to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, toward the cosmos' darkest corners, surveying the sky over a period of five years. By studying the snapshots, they've been able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, their method of probing populations of supermassive black holes, similar in size to the ones we see in today's universe, has given us a window into their origins. Now playing: Watch this: Life in microgravity is a lot harder than you think After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration. Notably, the researchers discovered a quasar with a much lower brightness than they expected. The features of that particular quasar, HSC J124353.93+010038.5, were reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in February. "The quasars we discovered will be an interesting subject for further follow-up observations with current and future facilities," said lead researcher Yoshiki Matsuoka in a statement.<doc-sep>Hole Story An international team of researchers says it’s found 83 new supermassive black holes at extreme end of the visible universe — by looking at light that took so long to reach Earth that it dates from the early universe. “It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang,” said Michael Strauss, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University involved in the research, in a press release. “Understanding how black holes can form in the early universe, and just how common they are, is a challenge for our cosmological models.” Squad Goals The discovery was made by 48 astronomers around the world who described the findings in five new papers in The Astrophysical Journal and the Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The finding was based on data taken with the Hyper Suprime-Cam, a “cutting-edge instrument” at the Subaru Telescope at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, in Hawaii, which the researchers combined with readings from three more powerful telescopes around the world. Advertisement Advertisement Quasar Theory The newly-discovered black holes are quasars, which shoot out matter in powerful jets. The researchers are hoping that more datagathering and analysis will shed light onto how some of the earliest quasars in the universe formed. “The quasars we discovered will be an interesting subject for further follow-up observations with current and future facilities,” said Yoshiki Matsuok, a researcher at Ehime University who worked on the discovery. “We will also learn about the formation and early evolution of [super massive black holes], by comparing the measured number density and luminosity distribution with predictions from theoretical models.” READ MORE: Astronomers discover 83 supermassive black holes at the edge of the universe [CNET] More on black holes: New Image Confirms a Black Hole is Swallowing Our Galaxy As a Futurism reader, we invite you join the Singularity Global Community, our parent company’s forum to discuss futuristic science & technology with like-minded people from all over the world. It’s free to join, sign up now!<doc-sep>An artist's conception of a quasar surrounding a supermassive black hole, which has a mass many times that of Earth's sun. Although nothing that falls into the black hole can escape, its massive gravity accelerates an "accretion disk" of luminous particles and gases around it. Astronomers have discovered 83 supermassive black holes birthed by the universe in its infancy. More precisely, the researchers have detected quasars, or huge, luminous disks of gases and dust that surround supermassive black holes. (The black holes themselves emit no light or energy, of course, though friction from the matter that swirls around and ultimately into a black hole's "mouth" does spit out immense light.) The quasars and their central black holes are 13 billion light-years away from Earth, meaning scientists are seeing the objects now as they appeared only 800 million years after the universe formed. Prior to the new discovery, which was made using Japan's Subaru Telescope, only 17 supermassive black holes were known from the region surveyed. [Stephen Hawking's Most Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes] Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and they are found only around black holes that are millions of times the mass of Earth's sun. The most distant quasar ever found was detected by the light it gave off only 690 million years after the Big Bang. Of the 83 newfound quasars, the most distant one is 13.05 billion light-years away from us. That means its light started its journey to the telescope lens within the universe's first billion years. This quasar is tied with an earlier discovery as the second-most distant quasar ever found. Light from one of the three most distant quasars ever found, which surrounds a supermassive black hole 13.05 billion light-years from Earth. (Image credit: NAOJ) The researchers, led by astronomer Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan, used a special instrument called the Hyper Suprime-Cam mounted on the Subaru Telescope; the observatory sits on the volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii. According to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the camera has a huge field of view and is surveying the entire sky over five years. The new finds suggest that in every cube of space that's a billion light-years per side, there is about one supermassive black hole and an associated quasar. A hundred quasars found in a survey by the Subaru Telescope: The top seven rows are 83 newfound quasars; the bottom two are 17 quasars that were already discovered. (Image credit: NAOJ) The study's findings are important because they're a window into the earliest days of the universe, after it transitioned from a mélange of hot subatomic particles into something a bit cooler and more organized. The early universe spent several hundred million years in darkness before its first stars formed; the oldest sign of the universe visible to astronomers goes back about 13.6 billion years. Soon after the first stars formed, hydrogen gas across the universe went through a period of re-ionization, when something very energetic split the atoms back into individual protons and electrons. Scientists don't know exactly what provided this energy, and quasars were one potential suspect. But the Matsuoka team's work, published Feb. 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests that there weren't enough quasars to do the job. Instead, the source of the re-ionization energy may have been newborn galaxies. Originally published on Live Science.<doc-sep>Astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University have discovered 83 quasars powered by supermassive black holes in the distant universe, from a time when the universe was less than 10 percent of its present age. “It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang,” said Michael Strauss, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University who is one of the co-authors of the study. “Understanding how black holes can form in the early universe, and just how common they are, is a challenge for our cosmological models.” This finding increases the number of black holes known at that epoch considerably, and reveals, for the first time, how common they are early in the universe’s history. In addition, it provides new insight into the effect of black holes on the physical state of gas in the early universe in its first billion years. The research appears in a series of five papers published in The Astrophysical Journal and the Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Supermassive black holes, found at the centers of galaxies, can be millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. While they are prevalent today, it is unclear when they first formed, and how many existed in the distant early universe. A supermassive black hole becomes visible when gas accretes onto it, causing it to shine as a “quasar.” Previous studies have been sensitive only to the very rare, most luminous quasars, and thus the most massive black holes. The new discoveries probe the population of fainter quasars, powered by black holes with masses comparable to most black holes seen in the present-day universe. The research team used data taken with a cutting-edge instrument, “Hyper Suprime-Cam” (HSC), mounted on the Subaru Telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, which is located on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. HSC has a gigantic field-of-view — 1.77 degrees across, or seven times the area of the full moon — mounted on one of the largest telescopes in the world. The HSC team is surveying the sky over the course of 300 nights of telescope time, spread over five years. The team selected distant quasar candidates from the sensitive HSC survey data. They then carried out an intensive observational campaign to obtain spectra of those candidates, using three telescopes: the Subaru Telescope; the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma in the Canaries, Spain; and the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. The survey has revealed 83 previously unknown very distant quasars. Together with 17 quasars already known in the survey region, the researchers found that there is roughly one supermassive black hole per cubic giga-light-year — in other words, if you chunked the universe into imaginary cubes that are a billion light-years on a side, each would hold one supermassive black hole. The sample of quasars in this study are about 13 billion light-years away from the Earth; in other words, we are seeing them as they existed 13 billion years ago. As the Big Bang took place 13.8 billion years ago, we are effectively looking back in time, seeing these quasars and supermassive black holes as they appeared only about 800 million years after the creation of the (known) universe. It is widely accepted that the hydrogen in the universe was once neutral, but was “reionized” — split into its component protons and electrons — around the time when the first generation of stars, galaxies and supermassive black holes were born, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This is a milestone of cosmic history, but astronomers still don’t know what provided the incredible amount of energy required to cause the reionization. A compelling hypothesis suggests that there were many more quasars in the early universe than detected previously, and it is their integrated radiation that reionized the universe. “However, the number of quasars we observed shows that this is not the case,” explained Robert Lupton, a 1985 Princeton Ph.D. alumnus who is a senior research scientist in astrophysical sciences. “The number of quasars seen is significantly less than needed to explain the reionization.” Reionization was therefore caused by another energy source, most likely numerous galaxies that started to form in the young universe. The present study was made possible by the world-leading survey ability of Subaru and HSC. “The quasars we discovered will be an interesting subject for further follow-up observations with current and future facilities,” said Yoshiki Matsuoka, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher now at Ehime University in Japan, who led the study. “We will also learn about the formation and early evolution of supermassive black holes, by comparing the measured number density and luminosity distribution with predictions from theoretical models.” Based on the results achieved so far, the team is looking forward to finding yet more distant black holes and discovering when the first supermassive black hole appeared in the universe. The HSC collaboration includes astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University. The HSC instrumentation and software were developed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), the University of Tokyo, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan (ASIAA), and Princeton University. Funding was contributed by the FIRST program from Japanese Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), the Toray Science Foundation, NAOJ, Kavli IPMU, KEK, ASIAA, and Princeton University. The results of the present study are published in the following five papers:<doc-sep>
Astronomers have just found 83 quasars, powered by supermassive black holes and dating back to the infancy of the Universe, when it was less than 10 percent of its current age. This discovery reveals that such objects were more common at the dawn of time than we thought, and challenges our entire cosmological model. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the Universe, extremely luminous galactic cores powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. As material swirls around the black hole, its friction generates such intense radiation that it can be seen, even from billions of light-years away. There's just one big problem. We think we know how black holes form - they are the collapsed cores of massive stars. And supermassive black holes can have up to billions of times the mass of the Sun. This takes time, and requires copious amounts of matter. So how the heck did all these quasars pop up so early in the Universe's history? "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said astrophysicist Michael Strauss of Princeton University. "Understanding how black holes can form in the early Universe, and just how common they are, is a challenge for our cosmological models." A quasar 13.05 billion light-years away. (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) We've known there were quasars hanging out back then. The oldest one we've seen dates back to around 690 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was around five percent of its current age - and a few others have been spotted too. But these - although still a puzzle - were thought to be relatively rare. So astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and the US broadened the search, using data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam mounted on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. With this instrument, they could look for much fainter quasars than ones discovered previously. The oldest quasar they found was a massive 13.05 billion light-years away, tying for the second-most distant quasar ever found. The Universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, and the first stars - we think - didn't appear until around 500 million years after the Big Bang, after the neutral hydrogen of the early-early Universe was reionised. That just leaves a couple of hundred million years for the quasars to form. The team's survey suggests that these objects were actually fairly abundant back then. They identified candidate quasars in the HSC data, then conducted a dedicated survey using multiple telescopes to obtain light signatures, or spectra, from these objects. (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) These spectra turned up the 83 new quasars, over the last few years. Together with 17 previously known quasars in the survey region, the team calculated that there's roughly one quasar for every cubic giga-light-year; that is, cube of space with a billion light-years per side. While that's more than previously thought, it's not quite enough for another hypothesis. Just after the Big Bang, the Universe was a sort of dark, hot "primordial soup" on a cosmic scale, rapidly expanding. As it expanded, it cooled, causing protons and neutrons to start to combine into ionised hydrogen atoms; around 240,000-300,000 years after the Big Bang, these hydrogen atoms attracted electrons, coalescing into neutral hydrogen. But it wasn't until gravity started to pull together the first stars and galaxies in this murky, hydrogen-filled void that starlight appeared… and not long after that, according to current theories, the neutral hydrogen was excited by the ultraviolet light of these newborn stars, galaxies, as-yet undetected quasars, or a combination of all three. This is called the Epoch of Reionisation, and we just don't know how it happened. But now we know - based on this research - there weren't enough quasars to be solely responsible for this process. The new quasar population data will help us learn more about the formation of supermassive black holes in the early Universe - and the team is going to continue the search to see if they can find quasars that are even older. This could help researchers to figure out when the first black holes were born. "The quasars we discovered will be an interesting subject for further follow-up observations with current and future facilities," said astronomer Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan. "We will also learn about the formation and early evolution of supermassive black holes, by comparing the measured number density and luminosity distribution with predictions from theoretical models."