NASA’s Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

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News release: 2010-088 March 17, 2010

NASA's Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-088&cid=release_2010-088

Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive
supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our
universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars came to be.

"We have found what are likely first-generation quasars, born in a dust-free medium and
at the earliest stages of evolution," said Linhua Jiang of the University of Arizona,
Tucson. Jiang is the lead author of a paper announcing the findings in the March 18 issue
of Nature.

Black holes are beastly distortions of space and time. The most massive and active ones
lurk at the cores of galaxies, and are usually surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of
dust and gas that feed and sustain the growing black holes. These hungry, supermassive
black holes are called quasars.

As grimy and unkempt as our present-day universe is today, scientists believe the very
early universe didn't have any dust -- which tells them that the most primitive quasars
should also be dust-free. But nobody had seen such immaculate quasars -- until now.
Spitzer has identified two -- the smallest on record -- about 13 billion light-years away
from Earth.

The quasars, called J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, were first unveiled in visible light using
data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. That discovery team, which included Jiang, was
led by Xiaohui Fan, a coauthor of the recent paper at the University of Arizona. NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory had also observed X-rays from one of the objects. X-rays,
ultraviolet and optical light stream out from quasars as the gas surrounding them is
swallowed.

"Quasars emit an enormous amount of light, making them detectable literally at the edge
of the observable universe," said Fan.

When Jiang and his colleagues set out to observe J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 with
Spitzer between 2006 and 2009, their targets didn't stand out much from the usual quasar
bunch. Spitzer measured infrared light from the objects along with 19 others, all
belonging to a class of the most distant quasars known. Each quasar is anchored by a
supermassive black hole weighing more than 100 million suns.

Of the 21 quasars, J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 lacked characteristic signatures of hot
dust, the Spitzer data showed. Spitzer's infrared sight makes the space telescope ideally
suited to detect the warm glow of dust that has been heated by feeding black holes.

"We think these early black holes are forming around the time when the dust was first
forming in the universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang," said Fan. "The
primordial universe did not contain any molecules that could coagulate to form dust. The
elements necessary for this process were produced and pumped into the universe later by
stars."

The astronomers also observed that the amount of hot dust in a quasar goes up with the
mass of its black hole. As a black hole grows, dust has more time to materialize around it.
The black holes at the cores of J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 have the smallest measured
masses known in the early universe, indicating they are particularly young, and at a stage
when dust has not yet formed around them.

Other authors include W.N. Brandt of Pennsylvania State University, University Park;
Chris L. Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, N.M.; Eiichi
Egami of the University of Arizona; Dean C. Hines of the Space Science Institute,
Boulder, Colo.; Jaron D. Kurk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics,
Germany; Gordon T. Richards of Drexel University, Philadephia, Pa.; Yue Shen of the
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.; Michael A. Strauss of
Princeton, N.J.; Marianne Vestergaard of the University of Arizona and Niels Bohr
Institute in Denmark; and Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy,
Germany. Fan and Kurk were based in part at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
when this research was conducted.

The Spitzer observations were made before the telescope ran out of its liquid coolant in
May 2009, beginning its "warm" mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space
Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science
operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about
Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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