Scientists Discover Unusual Signals Similar to Flashing Lights, “Transcending” from the Dawn of the Universe.
A team of astronomers from Stockholm University (Sweden) has analyzed data captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope regarding galaxies fading into existence shortly after the Big Bang, the event that birthed the universe, and uncovered some unusual phenomena.
These galaxies belong to the early universe, approximately 13 billion years ago.
A blinking black hole detected in Hubble data – (Photo: NASA/ESA).
These ancient galaxies were located about 13 billion light-years away from the position of Earth today, and the light that forms their images also took an equivalent amount of time to reach the telescope.
This inadvertently allows us to see images of the past and understand what happened when the universe was still in its infancy.
In this case, the strange signals captured by Hubble may help resolve a mystery: Did galaxies form before supermassive black holes, or vice versa?
According to the authors, the unusual signals at the cores of these galaxies are indeed their supermassive black holes, a type of black hole referred to as a supermassive black hole, significantly more powerful than the one at the center of our galaxy.
These are the largest black holes, weighing millions or even billions of times more than the Sun, acting like tears in the fabric of spacetime that eternally swallow anything that comes too close.
They resemble sleeping dragons, not continuously pulling in matter but only awakening and becoming active whenever something happens to pass by.
Each time they “wake up” to “feed,” they shine brightly like a lighthouse and then temporarily dim. This phenomenon causes the strange flickering light that Hubble has recorded.
In research published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the authors stated that they conducted a thorough review and realized that there are more of these types of black holes than previously thought.
Many of these objects appear to be larger than the mass scientists initially believed they could achieve in the early universe, indicating they had to be quite massive from the moment of their formation or developed rapidly.
The authors suggest that this size and prevalence imply that black holes—the cores of galaxies—emerged before the first galaxies formed.
They may have arisen from the collapse of massive, primordial stars in the first billion years of the universe’s existence.
These are extremely large, hot, and short-lived stars, capable of forming massive black holes upon their death, unlike the small stellar black holes we see today.
Additionally, they may also form directly from collapsing gas clouds or the merger of large stars.
Another intriguing scenario is that they are the result of the merger of a type of primordial black hole that formed just seconds after the Big Bang.
