NASA's Webb detects three million light-year-long cosmic filament in the early universe
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NASA, ESA, CSA, Feige Wang (University of Arizona), and Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked back in time to find the very first filaments of the cosmic web, which is a network of huge interconnected filaments of galaxies separated by vast voids.
A team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona have discovered a "thread-like arrangement" of 10 galaxies about 830 million years after the Big Bang, as per a press release.
According to the study, this arrangement is recognized as one of the most ancient filamentary formations discovered so far, and it is associated with a remote quasar.
The long cosmic filament
This massive filament is estimated to be three million light-years long.
“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is,” said Xiaohui Fan, one of the study authors. Fan added: “I expected to find something, but I didn't expect such a long, distinctly thin structure.”
The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is the largest filament identified to date, stretching 10 billion light years long and containing billions of galaxies.
The newly-identified structure is anchored by a distant, bright quasar – an object powered by an active supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of a galaxy. The authors stated that it will eventually evolve into a huge galaxy cluster.
Other observations on early black holes
In the same study, the researchers looked at the properties of eight quasars in the early universe, a billion years after the big bang.
They were also able to obtain the masses of their central black holes, which range between 600 million to two billion times the mass of our Sun.
One of the long-standing mysteries is how early black holes became so enormous. The latest Webb observations have obtained some data about how black holes are assembled to better understand this problem.
“To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied. First, you need to start growing from a massive ‘seed’ black hole. Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime,” explained Feige Wang.
Webb also gathered evidence for a possible link between star formation and the role played by the supermassive black holes in the early universe.
Interestingly, the outflow of stellar material is propelled by the powerful winds generated by supermassive black holes. These winds spread far beyond the black hole's surrounding region, perhaps influencing star formation at some level.
The findings are part of the ASPIRE project, which stands for A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era. The primary goal of ASPIRE is to study the surrounding of the earliest black holes.
The new results have been reported in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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