A new study aimed at understanding the nature of J1120+0641, a black hole from the cosmic dawn era, has yielded completely shocking results.
A recent study published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy attempted to “measure” the mass of the supermassive black hole J1120+0641, determining that it weighs one billion times the mass of our Sun.
This result has left scientists utterly baffled.
J1120+0641 is a “transcendent” black hole from an era known as “Cosmic Dawn”, which refers to the first billion years after the Big Bang that birthed the universe.
J1120+0641 “feeds” so intensely that it shines like a star – (Graphic: ESO).
J1120+0641 has appeared as a brilliant quasar in Earth-based observations since 2011.
In the new study, scientists utilized the James Webb Space Telescope (which began operations in 2022) to gain clearer insights into this mysterious object.
Referring to J1120+0641 as “transcendent” is due to the light creating an image of an object that requires a delay corresponding to the distance it travels to reach the telescope.
In other words, when we observe something billions of light-years away, we are looking back in time at the moment the light was emitted billions of years ago – essentially peering straight into the past.
This means that J1120+0641 reached such a gigantic size at that time – just 770 million years after the Big Bang, which is over 13 billion years ago.
According to widely accepted principles, primordial black holes must be simple and small. Over billions of years, they could gradually grow by consuming matter and possibly merging multiple times, eventually creating “supermassive” black holes.
A representative of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy where Earth resides, weighs nearly 4.3 million times the Sun.
Therefore, an object weighing one billion solar masses, appearing when the universe was only 770 million years old, becomes an inexplicable phenomenon.
It is possible that black holes in the early universe were “hungrier” than current supermassive black holes. However, black holes can only “consume” at a rate determined by the “Eddington limit”, which seems to be an insurmountable barrier in physics.
Exceeding this limit causes the heated material to shine brilliantly, to the point where radiation pressure surpasses gravitational force, pushing the material away and leaving nothing for the black hole to “consume.”
Nevertheless, the black hole J1120+0641 has broken the Eddington limit.
It may enter a super-Eddington accretion process, where it pushes past this limit and consumes as much matter as possible before radiation pressure takes effect.
This is one of the possible explanations for the black hole at the center of J1120+0641. Such an explanation would require many astronomical physical laws to be revised if we continue to discover similar phenomena in the early universe.
