Astronomers have found supermassive black holes in the centers of most galaxies. To get the black holes we see today, they must have been feeding in the past, packing on the mass to grow so big. But, a recent survey with JWST failed to turn up as many active galactic nuclei as astronomers expected. This just deepens the mystery. How did mature galaxies like the Milky Way get their black holes if they didn't go through this feeding period?
For decades the most distant objects we could see were quasars. We now know they are powerful active black holes. Active galactic nuclei so distant that they resemble star-like points of light. It tells us that supermassive black holes in the early Universe can be powerful monsters that drive the evolution of their galaxies. We had thought most early supermassive black holes went through such an active phase, but a new study suggests most supermassive black holes don’t.
Most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole. They contain millions or billions of solar masses. They can power tremendous jets of ionized gas streaming away from a galaxy at nearly the speed of light, rip stars apart to seed a galaxy with gas and dust, and even strip galaxies of dust to winnow star formation. They can also remain quiet for billions of years, hiding in a galaxy’s central bulge, as does the central black hole in the Milky Way.
This new study looks at a period of cosmic history known as cosmic noon. It’s the time when the Universe was about 3 – 6 billion years old and marks the age when star production in the Universe was at its peak. This is also around the time when we would expect supermassive black holes to be active since their churning of gas and dust can trigger star formation. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team gathered data from a patch of sky known as the Extended Groth Strip .
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