Naga czarna dziura odkryta przez Webba - burzy nasz model kosmosu - AstroSzort

James Webb's telescope does not cease to amaze us. Almost every new photo from the furthest corners of space is another riddle. Webb finds objects that, according to our best knowledge of the universe, simply should not exist. Today I will tell you about one of them. About an object with a complicated name Abel 2744 QSO1. It is a supermassive black hole that appeared on the space scene when the universe was still a baby. But the real shock is not that we found another early black hole. Because astronomers expected such discoveries. The real problem lies somewhere else. The surprise is that this black hole is naked. And it's not just some cosmic curiosity, but an observation that hits the very foundation of our understanding of the evolution of space. This one lonely object, if real, can force us to rewrite the entire history of the universe. My name is Piotr Kosek and I invite you to the world of space and science. Let's start with the evidence from the crime scene. What did the Webb telescope really see? Our main suspect, Abel 2744 QSO1, is one of the hundreds of so-called small red dots. So it's a class of objects that Webb sees in the very young universe. The name is literal, because in the photos they look like little dots. They shine mainly in the red and under the red angle of the spectrum. This is a characteristic signal that suggests the presence of hot dust and gas revolving around the active, devouring matter of the object, most likely a supermassive black hole. However, this particular dot is absolutely unique. For the first time in history, astronomers were able to look so closely and measure the speed of gas revolving around one of these distant objects. And knowing the speed and distance from the center, we can already calculate with great precision the mass of what is inside. The result? 50 million solar masses. This ultimately confirmed that we are dealing with a powerful black hole, and not, for example, with a very dense cluster of stars. The mass is simply too large and compressed over too little space. How did they manage to make such a precise measurement of an object whose light has been running to us for over 13 billion years? Astronomers had an ace up their sleeve, a rather gigantic space magnifying glass. The QSO1 object is located exactly behind the massive cluster of galaxies known as Abel 2744, or more poetically, the cluster of Pandora. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, such a gigantic mass distorts space-time itself. It works just like a lens that focuses and magnifies the light of objects far behind it. In this case, the light of our black hole has been amplified thousands of times. And it was the combination of the extraordinary power of the Webb telescope and this natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing that allowed to carry out the investigation on a cosmic scale. And this investigation led us to the key and most problematic discovery. This black hole, as I mentioned, is naked. In the astrophysical context, this means that it is almost completely devoid of its mother galaxy. Yes, there are some stars nearby, but there are dramatically few of them. Compared to the mass of the black hole itself, the mass of the surrounding stars is negligible. This is the most lonely, the most naked, supermassive black hole ever observed. And this, my dear, is a gigantic problem. Because to understand why, we have to look at the space instruction. And this instruction is our standard cosmological model. It is the current master of gravity, a theory that best describes the evolution of the Universe on the largest scales, and it's called Lambda CDM. It is a peculiar formula for the Universe, which, with only six basic parameters, is able, with incredible precision, to recreate everything we see, from radiation, which remained after the Big Bang, to the distribution of galaxies in modern space. Let's imagine that the Universe is a cake. According to the Lambda CDM recipe, its ingredients are about 5% ordinary, known to us as baryon matter, i.e. atoms from which stars, planets and we ourselves are made. Another 27% of the cake is cold, dark matter, It is a mysterious substance that we do not see, but we feel its gravity. And it is it that creates the invisible rusting on which galaxies are formed. The remaining 68% of the cake is even more enigmatic dark energy, represented by the Greek letter lambda. It is it that is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe. The Lambda CDM model has one fundamental principle when it comes to the formation of structures such as galaxies. It is a hierarchical process, often referred to as bottom-up. This means that first, the gravity of dark matter forms small thickenings, such as cosmic rustings. Ordinary matter is slowly drawn to them, from which the first small galaxies are born. Then, for billions of years, these small galaxies collide with each other and merge, creating larger and more complicated structures. It is a slow, gradual and very well-organized process. First, small things are created, and only from them, after a long time, those really big ones. And here's the problem. Because the Webb telescope regularly finds objects that seem to break this rule. It sees galaxies that are too big, too bright and too early formed than the Lambda CDM model allows. It is not a single anomaly, but an increasing pattern that suggests that the process of growth in the early Universe was much faster and more rapid than we thought so far. Our naked black hole is the most extreme example of this problem. In the Lambda CDM model, there was simply not enough time for a large galaxy to first form, then a supermassive black hole with a mass of 50 million solar masses grew in its center, and in the end, this black hole somehow got rid of almost all the stars in its galaxy. It's a bit like finding a fully developed adult just a few hours after his birth. This fundamentally breaks the rules of our space instruction. The word naked in the title of this episode is purposefully provocative and leads us to one of the deepest and most disturbing concepts in all of physics. A real, physical, naked personality. To understand what it is about, we have to immerse ourselves for a moment in the world of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. There is something in the heart of every black hole that we call a gravitational personality. It is a point, or rather a region, in which the density of matter and curvature of spacetime become mathematically infinite. All the laws of physics known to us are broken in the personality. It is a place where our knowledge simply ends. Fortunately, personalities are hidden from us. It is surrounded by a border called the event horizon. It is the so-called famous point of no return. The horizon acts like a cosmic curtain or a unidirectional membrane. You can fall into it, but absolutely nothing, even light, is not able to get behind it. We must also remember that the event horizon is not a physical barrier. It's a bit like a shadow. In a place where there is absolutely no light, we will have a black, cut-off border, but at the same time, when we enter there, we will not feel anything. It is not physical, it is just a border. And it is the same with the event horizon. It is a border beyond which information does not get to our universe, or rather to our part of the universe. And it is the event horizon that makes the black hole black. And it protects the rest of the universe from chaos and unpredictability that prevail in personalities. Here comes the brilliant physicist Roger Penrose with his hypothesis of cosmic censorship. To put it simply, this hypothesis says that nature does not tolerate naked personalities. This means that every personality that is created in a natural way, e.g. as a result of the collapse of a star, must be somewhat dressed in this event horizon. Why is it so important? Because if we could observe a personality directly, without a horizon curtain, the fundamental principle of causality would break. The universe would become completely unpredictable, and physics would lose its greatest power, i.e. the ability to predict the future, based on the present. That's why we have to say it clearly. The titled naked personality is a thought shortcut. Object Abel 2744-QSO1 is naked in the astrophysical sense. It just lacks the galaxy that surrounds it, but it's not about the lack of an event horizon. A real physical naked personality, i.e. one without a horizon, would be a much bigger shock to science, because it would undermine the very foundations of determinism in physics. The whole physics, de facto, not just a model of the universe's development. Okay, but since the standard model leads us here in the description of this strange object, what alternatives do we have? The first solution is an attempt to save the standard model, i.e. the path of evolution, not revolution. It consists of adding to our cosmic recipe one more quite exotic component of primordial black holes. In short, PBH from the English Primordial Black Holes. It's a completely different category of objects than black holes that are made of dying stars. Primordial black holes, as the name suggests, would have to be created in the primordial, very early universe. Let's explain this. Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects that are not remnants of stars. According to theories, they were created in the first second after the Big Bang. The universe was then unimaginably dense and hot soup of particles and radiation. If there were regions in this primordial plasma a little bit more dense, they could, under the influence of their own gravity, fall directly into black holes. Using analogies, these are not collapsed buildings that were built in a mature city, but defects in the very foundation on which the city was to be built. And how do primordial black holes solve the QSO1 problem? In an extremely simple and elegant way. They avoid the whole problem of time needed for growth. They wouldn't have to grow for billions of years, devouring gas and stars, they just grew big. If the universe has been saturated with such objects from the very beginning, then finding one of them with a mass of 50 million solar masses so early in the history of the universe ceases to be a problem. So it's not an anomaly, it's just finding what's been there forever. Interestingly, for decades, the idea of primordial black holes was treated by most physicists as a marginal concept that limits science. It required many very precise and well-tuned assumptions, and physicists don't like that very much. However, hard data from the James Webb telescope, such as the QSO1 observation, make scientists have to treat this idea deadly serious. What's more, primordial black holes have long been one of the main candidates for dark matter. If they really exist, they could solve two of the biggest puzzles of modern cosmology in one go. Okay, what if the problem is deeper? What if patching a standard model is not enough? This leads us to the second solution, the road to revolution. It's time for a radical alternative, which does not repair the model, but replaces it with something completely new. And this alternative is the many times mentioned modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. Such a fundamental challenge thrown at the idea of dark matter and, in a way, to Einstein himself. However, this is also in the previous episode. We will give you a link in the description. See for yourself, we will not repeat ourselves here and lay out MOND for the first factors. Especially since there are a lot of observations and a lot of interesting recent physical approaches that show that MOND is not necessarily true. Okay, and how would MOND explain the existence of an object like QSO1? Very simple. Because in conditions burning in the early universe, gravity according to MOND is much more powerful than in the standard model. So it's like turning on a space igniter. This enhanced gravity would rapidly accelerate the process of the formation of stars, galaxies and black holes. So the problem of this too early, too fast just disappears because everything in MOND has been happening faster since the beginning. The discovery of QSO1 is thus a key argument in one of the biggest debates in modern cosmology. Dark matter against modified gravity. It's the start of two completely different visions of the universe. This discovery is one of the greatest triumphs of science, because it is the moment when one precise observation puts us on the road and forces us to ask the deepest questions. The Webb telescope did not destroy cosmology here. Absolutely not. It just gave it a new, exciting life. It opened the door behind which answers to questions await which we have not even been able to ask until recently. And what will it be like when even bigger telescopes of this type appear? That's all in today's AstroShort, my dear. See you next time. See you. Take care and bye.