“This opens up brand new windows towards finally understanding luminous quasars and their host galaxies.”
“Ever since the discovery of [distant] quasars, there have been studies trying to detect their host galaxies,” said MIT astrophysicist Minghao Yue. But until JWST’s sharp infrared eyes came along, it wasn’t possible.
Yue and colleagues used JWST to observe six quasar-hosting galaxies. Around the same time, astrophysicist Xuheng Ding of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and colleagues used JWST to look at another pair of quasars. The light from all the quasars was emitted more than 12.8 billion years ago, or less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
What’s more, the galaxies seem to break a rule set by observations of galaxies in the nearby universe. Locally, galaxies tend to split their mass between stars and black holes in a predictable way: The more massive its central supermassive black hole, the more stars a galaxy has. These galaxies appear to pack more mass into their black hole than their amount of stars should allow.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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