Astronomers have spotted a red object surrounded by cosmic dust 13 billion light-years from Earth, which may be the oldest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole.

What are quasars?

Quasars are the nuclei of distant galaxies from which only the nucleus that appears as a star appears, and in the middle of it is a supermassive black hole. Ultra-massive in the centers of galaxies, with masses ranging from millions to tens of billions of times greater than the Earth's sun, these supermassive black holes absorb everything around them at an amazing speed, and the gas that blows it into these black holes is heated by friction, creating a bright glow that can be Compare it to starlight.

According to the authors of a new study published on April 13 in the journal "Nature", this newly discovered object was formed only 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an era called the "dawn of the universe", and this body appears to be the first evidence Visible as a galaxy spinning cosmic dust to form a supermassive black hole.

These objects, known as transformed red quasars, were only hypothesized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed until now.

“The discovered object connects two rare groups of celestial bodies, dusty starbursts and luminous quasars,” said lead study author Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, in a university press release. It provides a new avenue for understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe."

Rapid growth and transforming bodies

Previous research has shown that quasars were present during the first 700 million years of the universe's life, the study authors wrote;

However, it is unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang, while simulations suggest that some kind of rapidly growing transformation is occurring in dusty, star-dense galaxies.

"Theorists predicted that these black holes are undergoing an early stage of rapid growth, with a compact, red, dusty object emanating from a hot, dust-blocked galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement.

Clipping of an image of the GNz7q object from the image captured by the Hubble Telescope (European Space Agency-NASA)

In their new paper, the researchers say they discovered one of these rare mutant objects - officially called GNz7q - while studying an ancient star-forming galaxy using the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a short time when more than half of the stars are born in the thin disk), as the galaxy appears to be producing new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy today.

All of these newly formed stars produced a huge amount of heat, which warmed the gas surrounding that galaxy and made it glow brightly in infrared wavelengths, and the researchers add that the galaxy has actually become so hot that its dust is shimmering more than any other object, the researchers add. Known from the era of cosmic dawn.

Amidst this bright glowing dust, the researchers discovered a single red dot - a large compact body surrounded by a massive dust haze around it - and according to the researchers, the brightness and color of this red dot exactly matched the expected properties of a transforming red quasar.

Visualization of a black hole in the middle of a field of stars (Getty Images)

The first example of rapid growth

"The observed properties are in excellent agreement with theoretical simulations and indicate that the metamorphic object GNZ7Q is the first example of a rapidly growing metamorphic phase of black holes in the dusty core of a star, a precursor of a supermassive black hole," Brammer says.

Perhaps the team did not find this by chance;

It is likely that there are many other objects like him waiting to be detected by telescopes that can look further into the history of the early ages of the universe.

The researchers wrote that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched on December 25, will be able to search for these strange objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, and hopefully, shed more light on the mysterious cosmic dawn.