JPL: Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

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JPL: Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

Post by bystander » Wed Mar 17, 2010 7:32 pm

Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes
NASA JPL 2010-088 - 2010 March 17
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.
Astrophysics: First generation of quasars
The discovery of two quasars in the distant Universe that apparently have no hot dust in their environments provides evidence that these systems represent the first generation of their family.
Dust-free quasars in the early Universe
The most distant quasars known, at redshifts z ≈ 6, generally have properties indistinguishable from those of lower-redshift quasars in the rest-frame ultraviolet/optical and X-ray bands. This puzzling result suggests that these distant quasars are evolved objects even though the Universe was only seven per cent of its current age at these redshifts. Recently one z ≈ 6 quasar was shown not to have any detectable emission from hot dust, but it was unclear whether that indicated different hot-dust properties at high redshift or if it is simply an outlier. Here we report the discovery of a second quasar without hot-dust emission in a sample of 21 z ≈ 6 quasars. Such apparently hot-dust-free quasars have no counterparts at low redshift. Moreover, we demonstrate that the hot-dust abundance in the 21 quasars builds up in tandem with the growth of the central black hole, whereas at low redshift it is almost independent of the black hole mass. Thus z ≈ 6 quasars are indeed at an early evolutionary stage, with rapid mass accretion and dust formation. The two hot-dust-free quasars are likely to be first-generation quasars born in dust-free environments and are too young to have formed a detectable amount of hot dust around them.

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