The mystery grows around the ‘small red points’ in the primitive universe

In the galaxies of our surroundings, those of the nearby universe, the central black holes follow a rule almost rajataba: not exceed 0.01% of the stellar mass of its host galaxy, or said otherwise, for every 10,000 stellar masses , the black hole has one.

However, a team of astronomers led by Jorryt Matthee, of the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich (Eth Zurich), has just demonstrated that this does not happen in the farthest and most distant galaxies we know.

Matthee and his colleagues, in effect, have encountered the surprise that the supermasive black holes of some of the first galaxies seen by the James Webb space telescope have masses of up to 10% of the stellar mass of their hosts. Which means that for every 10,000 star masses in each of these galaxies, there are 1,000 solar masses in its supermassive black hole, an abysmal difference. The study can already be consulted on the ‘Arxiv’ prepublics server.

“In the most extreme stage,” says Matthee, “this would imply that black holes are 1,000 heavier than they should. But instead of saying that this discovery is worrying, I would say that it is promising, since that great discrepancy suggests that we are about to learn something new.

Mysterious ‘Red Points’

Since the summer of 2022, when the telescope began to transmit data to the Earth, the unique sensitivity of James Webb has allowed astronomers to look to the past more than with any other instrument, until it distinguished galaxies that existed only 300 million Years after the Big Bang. Observations, by the way, that brought more than one surprise, including the existence of a large number of small, mysterious and unusually bright ‘red points’ that seem to splash the entire primitive universe.

At first, its excessive brightness made scientists think that they were very massive galaxies, something that was against current cosmological models, according to those that galaxies are born as small and messy clouds of dust and stars that grow slowly to what long time. However, new studies revealed that the brightness was not due to an excessive size of those galaxies, but to the brilliant matter of matter turning at relativistic speeds around its central black holes. This is what astronomers know as ‘active galactic nuclei’ (AGT)

«In 2023 and 2024 – explains Matthee to ‘Space.com’– We and other groups we discover a previously hidden population of AGN in the early universe in the first webb data sets. The light that we see from these objects, in particular the redst light, originates in the accretion discs around supermasive black holes. These objects were baptized as ‘Little Red Dots’ (small red points) because this is how they appear in the images of the telescope «.

The cosmic web

And this is where Matthew’s new work and his team affects. The researchers selected a specific region of the sky and built a 3D map with all the galaxies present, including seven ‘red points’ that, unlike other studies, were perfectly located on the map.

Those seven points are so far from the earth that their light has been traveling to us more than 12.5 billion years. That is, there were already less than one billion years after the Big Bang, and are part of the so -called ‘cosmic galaxies’ web, the largest known structure of matter, in which galaxies are aligned in bright threads that converge in densest nodes, as if a gigantic tridimensional web was treated.

The position occupied by galaxies in that immense cosmic network depends, to a large extent, on its degree of evolution. The most massive and evolved are usually in the regions of greatest density, such as nodes, where the wires of the web converge. Younger and smaller galaxies, however, tend to be found in less dense regions, along the length of individual filaments and far from the nodes.

Matthew and his colleagues discovered that small red points are in rich environments in low -dough young galaxies. Which implies that they should also be young and of reduced mass.

More effective black holes

According to the study, the fact that these small galaxies contain very active nuclei (AGN) are the proof that the first black holes were able to actively grow even in galaxies with stellar masses as low as about 100 million times the mass of the Sol. In comparison, the Milky Way, our own galaxy, has an equivalent mass of around 200,000 million soles. In other words, the supermassive black holes of the early universe seem to be able to devour matter and grow much more effectively than the current ones.

“In my opinion,” says Matthew, “the most likely explanation for extremely fast growth of supermassive black holes is that, in the early universe, they were better nourished due to the high gas densities of the galaxies. Densities that also lead to high star densities, which promotes the formation of supermassive black holes by making the collisions of the remaining black holes easier ».

If really, it would mean that the formation of stars and supermassive black holes in galaxies are interdependent and closely linked processes. And although the supermassive black holes grew faster in the first galaxies, the formation of stars ‘is updated’ over time, which leads to the mass relationship observed today.

For Matthee, the next step is that both his team and the astronomical community in general eliminate the possibility that the relationship found between the stellar mass and the black holes of the first galaxies is not the result of inaccurate measurements or a bias of The investigation.

Which means that it will be necessary to discover smaller red pitch galaxies, a ‘hunt’ in which the James Webb telescope will undoubtedly play a fundamental role.