Scientists have encountered a significant misunderstanding while investigating a mysterious object that has created ripples in space-time, dazzling two NASA space telescopes.
According to Live Science, the object known as J221951 is one of the brightest things ever discovered by astronomers. It is located a staggering 10 billion light-years away from Earth, but due to its intense brightness, it was initially mistaken for a supernova located less than 1 billion light-years away.
Graphic depiction of the “cosmic monster” from an ancient and distant world – (Image: ESO).
In a new study, astronomers led by Dr. Matt Nicholl from Queen’s University Belfast (UK) attempted to determine the origin of the dazzling light observed by both NASA’s Hubble and Neil Gehrels Swift space telescopes.
The first surprise occurred when researchers tried to trace the path of gravitational waves from the object, a wave moving rapidly through space-time.
The initial hypothesis they proposed was that it was an explosion caused by the collision of two neutron stars. Neutron stars, known as “zombie” remnants of massive stars, can trigger a “kilonova”, which is much brighter than a typical supernova.
However, it could not be a kilonova, as kilonovas typically appear with blue light, transitioning to red after just a few days. This peculiar object remained blue for months, indicating it was much stronger, hotter, and brighter.
Data collected in the following months from the two NASA telescopes revealed a crucial detail: It is aligned with a faint and distant galaxy, located about 10 billion light-years away from us.
This distance means that the light from it took approximately 10 billion years to reach Earth, with slight errors due to the influence of objects along the path, forming the recorded image.
In other words, we are looking through space-time into a galaxy that existed when the universe was just over 1/4 of its current age, witnessing a brilliant event from 10 billion years ago.
“That brilliant ‘monster’ was ultimately identified as a massive black hole, which had just erupted in a violent outburst, shining in a quasar-like manner. Black holes typically shine this way when they are fortunate enough to have a big meal.
Regardless of the reason for its brightness, this once-in-a-thousand-years moment has allowed scientists to observe it, as dormant black holes are completely dark.
A black hole “monster” like this in the early universe is also an unexpected object, breaking the long-held theory that the dawn of the universe was very monotonous.
It adds to the recent evidence suggesting that the universe expanded unexpectedly rapidly in its first billion years, where galaxies were born en masse, colliding and merging multiple times.
These mergers caused supermassive black holes at the centers of these galaxies to merge and create giant “monsters”, such as Sagittarius A* in the Milky Way, which is the galaxy containing Earth—a “giant” that has undergone at least nearly 20 mergers.
