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By NASA
This illustration shows a red, early-universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The black hole is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate so soon after the birth of the universe, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early universe.
The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey, a catalog resulting from some 4.6 million Chandra observations. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous near-infrared observations. By following up with Webb, astronomers could use the observatory’s unique infrared sensitivity to detect these faint counterpart emissions, which led to the discovery of the black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.
LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole “seeds,” which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
The new discovery suggests that “a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who led the research team.
A paper describing these results (“A super-Eddington-accreting black hole ~1.5 Gyr after the Big Bang observed with JWST”) appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.
About the Missions
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
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Elizabeth Laundau
NASA Headquarters
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202-923-0167
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Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
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By NASA
Teams with NASA and Lockheed Martin prepare to conduct testing on NASA’s Orion spacecraft on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in the altitude chamber inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf Teams lifted NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II test flight out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell and moved it to the altitude chamber to complete further testing on Nov. 6 inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Engineers returned the spacecraft to the altitude chamber, which simulates deep space vacuum conditions, to complete the remaining test requirements and provide additional data to augment data gained during testing earlier this summer.
The Artemis II test flight will be NASA’s first mission with crew under the Artemis campaign, sending NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.
Image credit: Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf
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By NASA
Learn Home Integrating Relevant Science… Earth Science Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 3 min read
Integrating Relevant Science Investigations into Migrant Children Education
For three weeks in August, over 100 migrant children (ages 3-15) got to engage in hands-on activities involving blueberries, pollinators, and eDNA as part of their time with The Blueberry Harvest School (BHS). BHS is a summer school program for migrant children whose families work in Washington County, Maine during the wild blueberry harvest season. The program is hosted by Mano en Mano in Milbridge, Maine. This summer, University of Maine 4-H (part of the NASA Science Activation Program’s Learning Ecosystems Northeast team) was invited to deliver enrichment programs during the school day alongside a seasoned BHS employee – an educator from the Mi’kmaq community in what is now known as Nova Scotia.
The goal of BHS is to meet the needs of youth by providing “culturally responsive, project-based learning while preventing summer learning loss and compensating for school disruptions among students” (Mano en Mano). Migrant families come to Downeast from Mi’kmaq First Nation communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, southern states, and from within Maine, including Passamoquoddy communities in eastern Washington County and a Latino community in the western part of the county. Families stay to harvest blueberries anywhere from two to five weeks. With support from 4-H educators, youth surveyed the schoolyard for pollinators, investigated the parts of pollinators and flowers, and learned why blueberries are an important part of Wabanaki culture.
“BHS really becomes a home for the children while they are here. I think one of the reasons is because they are encouraged to be proud of their identity and who they are – they get to be their authentic selves. It’s a neat space where teachers and youth are speaking Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Spanish and English while supporting each other, and learning and experiencing new things.” — Gabrielle Brodek, 4-H Professional
“After completing my second year helping at Blueberry Harvest School, I loved seeing the returning faces of the kids who have been coming year after year – the kids remember you and hug you and are sad when the season is over and BHS ends.” — Jason Palomo, 4-H Professional
Resources and inspiration for these activities came from NASA Climate Kids, Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Bees, Blueberries, and Climate Change learning module, National 4-H and ME Ag in the Classroom. On the last day youth experienced how to make a natural dye out of blueberries, a long-standing tradition in Native American culture. Our organizations continue to work together year-round, building stronger relationships and planning for Summer 2025!
The Learning Ecosystems Northeast project is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB94A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
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Last Updated Nov 06, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
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Citizen science projects enabled by data from the WISE and NEOWISE missions have given hundreds of thousands around the world the opportunity to make new discoveries. The projects can be done by anyone with a laptop and internet access and are available in fifteen languages. No U.S. citizenship required. NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft re-entered and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere on Friday night, as expected. Launched in 2009 as the WISE mission, the spacecraft has been mapping the entire sky at infrared wavelengths over and over for nearly fifteen years. During that time, more than one hundred thousand amateur scientists have used these data in citizen science projects like the Milky Way Project, Disk Detective, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors, and Exoasteroids.
This citizen science work has led to more than 55 scientific publications. Highlights include:
The discovery of Yellowballs, a kind of compact star-forming region. The discovery of Peter Pan Disks, long lived accretion disks around low-mass stars. The discovery of the first extreme T subdwarfs. The likely discovery of an aurora on a brown dwarf. Measurement of the field substellar mass function down to effective temperature ~400 K. The discovery of the oldest known white dwarf with a disk. Detection of a possible collision between planets. The discovery of the lowest-mass hypervelocity star. Although the spacecraft is no longer in orbit, there is plenty of work to do. The WISE/NEOWISE data contain trillions of detections of astronomical sources – enough to keep projects like Disk Detective, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors, and Exoasteroids busy making new discoveries for years to come. Join one of these projects today to help unravel the mysteries of the infrared universe!
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
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Final Venus Flyby for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Queues Closest Sun Pass
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will complete its final Venus gravity assist maneuver, passing within 233 miles (376 km) of Venus’ surface. The flyby will adjust Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.86 million miles of the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human made object has been to the Sun.
Parker’s Venus flybys have become boons for new Venus science thanks to a chance discovery from its Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR. The instrument peers out from Parker and away from the Sun to see fine details in the solar wind. But on July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists turned WISPR toward Venus in hopes of tracking changes in the planet’s thick cloud cover. The images revealed a surprise: A portion of WISPR’s data, which captures visible and near infrared light, seemed to see all the way through the clouds to the Venusian surface below.
“The WISPR cameras can see through the clouds to the surface of Venus, which glows in the near-infrared because it’s so hot,” said Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Venus, sizzling at approximately 869 degrees Fahrenheit (about 465 C), was radiating through the clouds.
The WISPR images from the 2020 flyby, as well as the next flyby in 2021, revealed Venus’ surface in a new light. But they also raised puzzling questions, and scientists have devised the Nov. 6 flyby to help answer them.
Left: A series of WISPR images of the nightside of Venus from Parker Solar Probe’s fourth flyby showing near infrared emissions from the surface. In these images, lighter shades represent warmer temperatures and darker shades represent cooler. Right: A combined mosaic of radar images of Venus’ surface from NASA’s Magellan mission, where the brightness indicates radar properties from smooth (dark) to rough (light), and the colors indicate elevation from low (blue) to high (red). The Venus images correspond well with data from the Magellan spacecraft, showing dark and light patterns that line up with surface regions Magellan captured when it mapped Venus’ surface using radar from 1990 to 1994. Yet some parts of the WISPR images appear brighter than expected, hinting at extra information captured by WISPR’s data. Is WISPR picking up on chemical differences on the surface, where the ground is made of different material? Perhaps it’s seeing variations in age, where more recent lava flows added a fresh coat to the Venusian surface.
“Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface,” Izenberg said.
After the Nov. 6 flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the Sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
“This is a major engineering accomplishment,” said Adam Szabo, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA’s Living with a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living with a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA and designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
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