First Black Holes Almost As Old As the Universe

In their survey of the skies, astronomers managed to discover a pair of black holes so distant, that they believed to have formed a relatively short period of time after the Big Bang exploded the Universe into being. The announcement was made on Wednesday, March 17, by experts at the University of Arizona. Details of their investigations, and also of the two primordial black holes, appear in the March 18 issue of the esteemed scientific publication Nature, Space reports.

One of the main things that give away the age of these space structures is their primitive form. This suggests that they appeared in a Universe that was significantly different from the one we can observe today. This type of studies is extremely important to astronomers and astrophysicists, who are still trying to determine how the earliest stars, galaxies and black holes appeared from the chaotic mass of matter that the Big Bang produced. Based on current knowledge, the entire Cosmos is only 13.75 billion years old, while these primitive black holes are believed to be about 13 billion years old.

In the journal entry, the scientists explain that the two black holes, which were qualified as quasars, are very different from existing ones simply because they do not have an accretion disk around them. Generally, black holes are surrounded by a massive cloud of dust, which spins around the event horizon until it falls through. These two structures show no signs of such a disk, which means that they formed in a time when dust didn't even exist. Quasars are highly active black holes, which emit a considerable amount of light and radiation as matter is consumed.

“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. 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,” University of Arizona astronomer Xiaohui Fan, who has also been the leader of the research team, explains. The scientist says that the black holes, dubbed J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, were found with the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. The observatory sees the Universe in infrared wavelengths.

“It appears we have found what are likely primitive first-generation quasars, that are born in a dust-free medium shortly after Big Bang. It is fantastic that we are witness to this building up of black holes and the amount of heavier elements in the form of dust,” University of Copenhagen astrophysicist and study researcher Marianne Vestergaard says.