Astronomers discover 83 supermassive black holes at the edge of the universe

A team of international astronomers searched for ancient supermassive black holes – and they crashed into the maternal lineage by uncovering 83 previously unknown quasars.

The universe is full of supermassive black holes, monstrous versions of the humble black hole daily, containing masses millions or billions of times that of our sun. These huge cosmic beasts generate gigantic gravitational effects. So you will often find supermassive black holes that hide in the center of galaxies, surrounded by billions of stars. That's exactly what is happening in our home galaxy of the Milky Way.

To find them hidden in the distant lands of the universe, you must study the light of the gases that accumulate around them. Because we can not see a black hole, but we can see the light, we designate these powerful light sources as "quasars". Under the eyepiece of a telescope, they may look more like stars – they are extremely bright – but scientists generally think that their light comes from gases that fall to a black hole.

The Japanese team shot the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", mounted on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, to the darkest corners of the cosmos, watching the sky for five years. By studying the snapshots, they were able to pick potential quasar candidates in the dark. Their method of investigating supermassive black hole populations, of a size similar to what we see in the present universe, gave us a glimpse of their origins.

After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a series of international telescopes to confirm its findings. The quasars they picked come from the very beginning of the universe, about 13 billion light years from Earth. Concretely, this means that researchers are looking into the past, that objects are formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

"It is remarkable that such dense and massive objects could have formed so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, co-author of the document, in a press release.

Scientists do not know exactly how black holes formed in the primitive universe. Therefore, being able to detect them as far back in the past provides new avenues for exploration. The researchers discovered a quasar with a brightness well below that expected. The characteristics of this particular quasar, HSC J124353.93 + 010038.5, have been reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in February.

"The quasars we have discovered will be an interesting topic for future follow-up observations with current and future facilities," Yoshiki Matsuoka, principal investigator, said in a statement.