GNz7q had been lurking unnoticed in one of the best-studied areas of the night.
The astronauts of American space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), have recently found evidence of a "rapidly growing black hole" - long considered a “missing link” in our knowledge of the early universe. Using data from the Hubble space telescope, astronauts discovered the "monster" body that was formed around 750 million years after the Big Bang.
The US space agency explained, "Until now, the monster, nicknamed GNz7q, had been lurking unnoticed in one of the best-studied areas of the night sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North) field."
"The team obtained evidence that GNz7q is a newly formed black hole. Hubble found a compact source of ultraviolet (UV) and infrared light. This couldn't be caused by emission from galaxies, but is consistent with the radiation expected from materials that are falling onto a black hole," NASA added.
Further, according to astronauts, rapidly-growing black holes in dusty, early star-forming galaxies, predicted by theories and computer simulations, had not been observed until now. Seiji Fujimoto, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, explained that the latest analysis suggests that GNz7q is the first example of a rapidly growing black hole in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy at an epoch close to the earliest supermassive black hole known in the universe.
“The object's properties across the electromagnetic spectrum are in excellent agreement with predictions from theoretical simulations,” Seiji Fujimoto added in a statement.
NASA stated that the current theories predict that supermassive black holes begin their lives in the dust-shrouded cores of vigorously star-forming “starburst” galaxies before expelling the surrounding gas and dust and emerging as extremely luminous quasars, which are basically extremely bright objects in the universe that are said to be powered by black holes.
Astronauts informed that even though this is extremely rare, both the dusty starburst galaxies and luminous quasars have been detected in the early universe. The team, therefore, believes that the GNz7q could be a “missing link” between the two classes of objects as it has exactly both aspects of the dusty starburst galaxy and the quasar.
It is to mention that this latest discovery provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early days of the universe. Therefore, NASA astronauts believe that the latest discovery provides an example of precursors to the supermassive black holes that they observe at later epochs.
Now, “the team now hopes to systematically search for similar objects using dedicated high-resolution surveys and to take advantage of the NASA James Webb Space Telescope's spectroscopic instruments to study objects such as GNz7q in unprecedented detail,” the space agency said.