Little red dots<\/a>\u201d have been spotted on the majority of JWST\u2019s deep space images.<\/p>\n\u201cThese little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cWhat exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,\u201d co-author MKI Director Robert Simcoe explained. \u201cJust as wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTruly singular in so many ways\u201d<\/p>\n
The dot\u2019s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where it disappeared completely.<\/p>\n
This phenomenom is known as a \u201cBalmer break\u201d and is traditionally associated with desnse gases absorbing photons in the atmosphere of stars only a few hundred million years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out \u2018ordinary\u2019 stars as the source,\u201d Naidu continued. \u201cBut it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of \u2018stellar atmosphere,\u2019 but on a spectacular scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
The light emitted from the red dot also contained almost no signature of metals or any elements, bar hydrogen and helium. \u201cIt was truly singular in so many ways,\u201d Naidu says.<\/p>\n
Recreating the red light<\/p>\n
The team ran simulations of various scenarios to better understand MoM-BH*-1.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?\u201d Simcoe says. \u201cTo our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.\u201d<\/p>\n
The simulations suggested that the red dot could be an energy source surrounded by a very dense shroud of hydrogen, which would explain the lack of metals in the atmosphere and the Balmer break observed. But it would not explain for the extreme brightness of the object.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,\u201d Naidu said. \u201cThat means you can\u2019t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
A black hole is believed to sit at the centre of the star<\/p>\n
The researchers knew that black holes can produce energy at a similar scale to the output seen in the object and so adjusted simulations to incorporate an active, accreting black hole at varied masses, as well as with other conditions.<\/p>\n
When comparing the brightness from this simulated black hole star to the JWST images, the team concluded that the most likely explaination is that the object contains a central black hole around 100,000 times as massive as the sun. A dense cocoon of hydrogen roughly the size of our solar system surrounds this black hole core.<\/p>\n
This research could have implications for the little red dots observed in other JWST imagery, although these objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cBut what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we\u2019re seeing pure black hole star light.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIT astronomers have identified an extremely bright red spot resembling an ancient enormous star- that also exudes 100…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[582,18,19,17,133,1224,29902],"class_list":["post-645044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astronomy","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space-exploration","tag-telescopes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117121009824473315","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}