00:00The James Webb Space Telescope is an absolutely stunning piece of equipment,
00:05which is around 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope,
00:09and the latter has managed to observe places that are around 13 billion light years away.
00:15But recently James Webb has outdone itself. It spotted something it wasn't supposed to see.
00:20Astronomers using the telescope have detected a supermassive black hole
00:24from when our universe was less than 600 million years old.
00:28Just a baby, this discovery is the most distant, actively feeding supermassive black ever observed.
00:34It's located at the heart of its host galaxy, designated Ceres 1019.
00:40The black hole is also one of the smallest and least massive ones found in the early universe.
00:45It's equal to approximately 9 million suns.
00:48It might seem like a lot, but in reality,
00:51supermassive black holes often grow to billions of times the mass of our star.
00:55But what is so unusual about this find, and why are scientists having a hard time trying to explain it?
01:01You see, it's supposed to take way longer than 600 million years
01:05for a supermassive black hole to grow to its full potential.
01:09It happens when a black hole either feasts on surrounding matter, or merges with a larger black hole.
01:15Even black holes similar to the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy,
01:19which is almost 4.5 million times the mass of our sun,
01:23are supposed to be seen in the more recent universe.
01:26Well, to tell you the truth, scientists have long suspected that supermassive black holes
01:31could have existed in the early universe.
01:34But this theory has been proven only thanks to the JWST and its infrared eye.
01:39It has shown that the black hole Ceres 1019 is actively munching on all the matter it can lay its hands on.
01:46Such feeding black holes are usually surrounded by swirls of gas and dust falling inside them.
01:51Such swirls are also called accretion disks.
01:54The gravitational force of a black hole heats this matter, which makes the disk shine bright like a diamond.
02:00Ahem, sorry, but that's not all.
02:02Strong magnetic fields produced in the process channel the matter to the poles of the black hole,
02:07and from time to time this matter is blasted out of there in twin powerful jets.
02:11They move at a speed that is close to the speed of light, which generates incredibly bright light.
02:17By the way, astronomers were watching the galaxy hosting the unusually old black hole
02:23as part of the cosmic evolution early release since survey.
02:27They saw the galaxy as it was when the universe, which is around 13.8 billion years old now,
02:33was a mere 570 million years old.
02:36Besides the main character of this video, scientists spotted two other black holes.
02:41Those probably appeared 1 in 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang
02:45and 11 ancient galaxies that existed between 470 and 675 million years after the beginning of cosmic history.
02:54The coolest thing about all these discoveries is that until recently,
02:58all research about things that existed in the early universe was mostly theoretical.
03:02But now, with the help of the James Webb Telescope,
03:05astronomers can not only see galaxies and black holes at unimaginable distances,
03:10but they can also measure them.
03:12This isn't the only discovery connected with black holes made recently.
03:16For example, not so long ago scientists saw two stars slow down in their orbits around black holes
03:22and concluded it was most likely the result of drag produced by dark matter.
03:26It was the first time astronomers might have discovered some indirect evidence
03:30that huge amounts of dark matter could surround black holes.
03:34Now, about that dark matter. What is it? And what does it consist of?
03:39Our universe consists of normal matter, dark matter, and dark energy.
03:43Normal matter, which is everything you can see with your own eyes or with the help of instruments,
03:48makes up around 5% of the universe.
03:51Hmm, since it's such a small fraction of the universe, maybe we shouldn't call it normal?
03:57Dark energy takes up around 68%, and about 27% of the universe is dark matter.
04:05This dark matter is just one more space thing that confuses scientists to no end.
04:10If dark energy is a force responsible for the expansion of the universe,
04:14dark matter is supposed to explain how objects work together.
04:18Potential candidates for dark matter vary from strange particles to super dim objects.
04:23But even though astronomers can't grasp what exactly dark matter is,
04:27they know for sure what it isn't.
04:29This matter is dark, so we can rule out visible stars and planets.
04:33It also can't be dark clouds of normal matter.
04:36Otherwise, scientists would be able to detect it.
04:39Dark matter is not antimatter, since astronomers don't see unique gamma rays
04:43that appear when antimatter comes in contact with matter.
04:46And neither is dark matter gigantic galaxy-sized black holes.
04:50In other words, dark matter is still as much of a mystery to us as dark energy.
04:55Anyway, back to the potential dark matter discovered around the black holes.
05:00If it is confirmed, it'll be a great breakthrough in dark matter research.
05:04What helped scientists come up with this idea is that dark matter interacts gravitationally,
05:10influencing ordinary matter.
05:12So, a team of researchers watched the orbits of two stars decay by about 1 millisecond per year
05:19while they were circling their companion black holes.
05:22The scientists concluded that these changes in speed were the result of dark matter generating friction
05:28and a drag on the stars.
05:30With the help of computer simulations of the black hole systems,
05:34the team tested a model widely known in cosmology.
05:38It's called the dark matter dynamic friction model,
05:41and it predicts a certain loss of momentum by objects that are gravitationally interacting with dark matter.
05:47And guess what? The simulation matched these predictions.
05:51The results of this research helped to confirm a theory that had existed for a long time,
05:56that black holes can actually swallow dark matter that comes too close.
06:00As a result, dark matter gets redistributed around black holes,
06:04creating areas with different densities, which can influence the orbits of surrounding objects,
06:10like the stars we've been talking about.
06:12Speaking of black holes, there's a theory that primordial black holes could actually be dark matter.
06:18This type of black hole is hypothetical since scientists have never got any real proof of their existence.
06:24Such holes are insanely old and quite tiny, by black hole standards, that is.
06:29Astronomers believe they could appear several milliseconds after the Big Bang.
06:33At that time, stars and galaxies weren't born yet.
06:37It means primordial black holes probably witnessed the entire history of the universe.
06:42By now, the smallest primordial black holes have most likely evaporated away,
06:46but some bigger ones can still be scattered out there in space.
06:50If primordial black holes indeed existed, they could appear because in some regions of space,
06:55it was hotter, other regions were cooler, and some areas were extremely dense.
07:00Scientists believe these dense spots could collapse into primordial black holes.
07:05The most curious thing, though?
07:07These holes might be so small exactly because they popped up right after the Big Bang.
07:11The thing is, the longer it took a black hole to appear, the larger it was.
07:16The mass difference between older, smaller, and younger, bigger black holes was incredible.
07:22Compare the mass a thousand times greater than our sun's and that of a pea.
07:25There you go.
07:27Anyway, the idea of the connection between primordial black holes and dark matter,
07:32or rather, the idea of them being the same thing, remained unpopular for decades.
07:38But recently, scientists have realized there are many more black holes in the universe than they used to think,
07:44and it means that the theory might actually work.
07:47And the vast and still hidden from us population of Big Bang black holes could not only make up but be dark matter.
07:55After all, astronomers haven't discovered a single dark matter particle yet, even after decades of searching.
08:02That's it for today.
08:03So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
08:08Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side.
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