While the origins of life is a fundamental question even for five-year-olds, for us astronomers there are some more specific fundamental questions like, “Where do supermassive black holes come from?”

As near as we can tell, as far back as we look, there are massive galaxies that have supermassive black holes in their centers. Forming these black holes doesn’t appear to be a process that involves small black holes merging into increasingly larger black holes. Instead, they had to form through some other process we don’t see happening in our modern universe. 

One idea has been that massive clouds of material may have been able to collapse into the first galaxies. These dusty systems would have massive star formation, and through turbulent processes, they would also funnel material into their cores, where supermassive black holes formed. While theorists can create these kinds of galaxies in their software, the universe hasn’t exactly been providing us galaxies to study.

At least not until now. The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a galaxy cataloged as GNz7q that seems to fit the bill. This discovery is published in Nature in a paper led by Seiji Fujimoto, who explains: Our 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. GNz7q provides a direct connection between these two rare populations and provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early days of the Universe. Our discovery is a precursor of the supermassive black holes we observe at later epochs.

This far-off galaxy was very much a needle in a haystack. Located in a well-studied region of the sky called the Hubble GOODS North field, this system shines faintly from the background as it forms 1,600 stars per year. Co-author Gabriel Brammer explains: GNz7q is a unique discovery that was found just at the center of a famous, well-studied sky field — showing that big discoveries can often be hidden just in front of you. It’s unlikely that discovering GNz7q within the relatively small GOODS-N survey area was just ‘dumb luck’ rather the prevalence of such sources may in fact be significantly higher than previously thought.

The lesson here is to look at every smear of light because you never know which one will be awesome.

More Information

ESA Hubble press release

Hubblesite press release

NAOJ press release

Subaru Telescope press release

“A dusty compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn,” S. Fujimoto et al., 2022 April 13, Nature