This Week in Astronomy: Earliest Known Black Hole Found, Clumpy Galaxy in Early Universe and Stars Born Tilted

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
<v Speaker 1>with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
<v Speaker 1>gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
<v Speaker 1>unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
<v Speaker 1>of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
<v Speaker 1>slumber under the night sky. This week in Astronomy, earliest
<v Speaker 1>known black hole found, clumpy galaxy in early universe and
<v Speaker 1>stars born tilted earliest known black hole found. A group
<v Speaker 1>of astronomers from around the world, led by scientists at
<v Speaker 1>the University of Texas at Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center has
<v Speaker 1>found the most distant black hole ever confirmed. This black
<v Speaker 1>hole is inside a galaxy called Caper's LRDZ nine, which
<v Speaker 1>existed just five hundred million years after the Big Bang.
<v Speaker 1>That means we are seeing it as it was thirteen
<v Speaker 1>point three billion years ago, when the universe was only
<v Speaker 1>about three percent of its current age. Because of how
<v Speaker 1>far back in time this is, it gives scientists a
<v Speaker 1>rare chance to study what the universe was like during
<v Speaker 1>one of its earliest and most mysterious phases. The team
<v Speaker 1>explains that this is about as far back as it's
<v Speaker 1>realistically possible to detect a black hole with today's technology.
<v Speaker 1>While some more distant black hole candidates have been found,
<v Speaker 1>none have had the clear and unique light pattern that
<v Speaker 1>confirms a black hole's presence. This pattern is identified using
<v Speaker 1>a technique called spectroscopy, which splits light into its different wavelengths.
<v Speaker 1>In the case of a black hole, astronomers look for
<v Speaker 1>signs of gas moving very quickly. Gas falling into a
<v Speaker 1>black hole shifts light from one side toward red wavelengths
<v Speaker 1>and light from the other side toward blue wavelengths due
<v Speaker 1>to its high speed motion. There are few things in
<v Speaker 1>the universe that produce such a pattern, and this galaxy
<v Speaker 1>shows it. The discovery was made using data from the
<v Speaker 1>James Web Space Telescope JWST, specifically from a program called CAPERS,
<v Speaker 1>which focuses on studying the earliest galaxies. JWST, launched in
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty one, can see farther into space than any
<v Speaker 1>other telescope. One of the goals of CAPERS is to
<v Speaker 1>confirm the distances of very old galaxies and study their
<v Speaker 1>physical properties. Caper's LRDZ nine was first spotted as a
<v Speaker 1>tiny red dot in telescope images and later identified as
<v Speaker 1>part of a recently discovered type of galaxy called little
<v Speaker 1>Red dots. These galaxies only existed within the first one
<v Speaker 1>point five billion years of the universe and are unusually compact,
<v Speaker 1>red and bright. Their appearance was surprising to astronomers, as
<v Speaker 1>they look completely different from galaxies seen by the Hubble
<v Speaker 1>Space telescope. Scientists are still working to understand what they
<v Speaker 1>are and how they formed. The new discovery strengthens the
<v Speaker 1>idea that supermassive black holes may be the reason Little
<v Speaker 1>Red Dots are so bright. Normally, such brightness would mean
<v Speaker 1>a galaxy as many stars, but at that time in
<v Speaker 1>the universe's history it's unlikely they had that many. Black Holes, however,
<v Speaker 1>can shine brilliantly by heating and compressing the material they consume.
<v Speaker 1>The confirmed black hole in Caper's LRDZ nine provides a
<v Speaker 1>clear example of this. It may also explain why these
<v Speaker 1>galaxies are so red. One theory is that thick clouds
<v Speaker 1>of gas around the black hole change the color of
<v Speaker 1>the light passing through them, shifting it toward the red.
<v Speaker 1>The patterns seen in this galaxy match those from others
<v Speaker 1>where such gas clouds have been detected. This black hole
<v Speaker 1>is extremely massive, with up to three hundred million times
<v Speaker 1>the mass of the Sun, making it almost as heavy
<v Speaker 1>as half of all the stars in its galaxy combined.
<v Speaker 1>Finding such a large black hole so early in the
<v Speaker 1>universe's history challenges existing theories. Either early black holes grew
<v Speaker 1>far faster than expected, or they formed already much larger
<v Speaker 1>than scientists thought possible. The researchers now hope to get sharper,
<v Speaker 1>more detailed observations of Caper's LRDZ nine with the James
<v Speaker 1>Webb Space Telescope. This will help them learn more about
<v Speaker 1>the galaxy, its black hole, and what role black holes
<v Speaker 1>played in the formation of little red dots. They see
<v Speaker 1>this as a valuable object for studying how black holes
<v Speaker 1>evolved in the early universe, something they could only begin
<v Speaker 1>doing very recently. Cosmic Grapes clumpy galaxy in early universe.
<v Speaker 1>Astronomers have found a very unusual galaxy that existed only
<v Speaker 1>nine hundred million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy,
<v Speaker 1>nicknamed the Cosmic Grapes, is rotating and made up of
<v Speaker 1>at LEAs at least fifteen large clumps of stars forming
<v Speaker 1>all at once. That is, far more clumps than scientists
<v Speaker 1>thought could exist in a single rotating galaxy so early
<v Speaker 1>in the universe's history. The discovery was possible thanks to
<v Speaker 1>detailed observations from both the James Webb Space Telescope and
<v Speaker 1>the ATTICOM, a large millimeter slash submillimeter array. The galaxy
<v Speaker 1>also happened to be perfectly positioned behind a giant cluster
<v Speaker 1>of galaxies, which acted like a natural magnifying glass through
<v Speaker 1>gravitational lensing. This combination allowed astronomers to study it in
<v Speaker 1>extraordinary detail using more than one hundred hours of telescope time.
<v Speaker 1>When seen before with the Hubble Space Telescope, the galaxy
<v Speaker 1>looked smooth and disc shaped, with no sign of anything unusual.
<v Speaker 1>But with the much sharper vision of JWST and ALMA
<v Speaker 1>and the extra magnification from gravitational lensing, astronomers saw something
<v Speaker 1>completely different. The galaxy was full of bright, dense clumps,
<v Speaker 1>packed together like a bunch of grapes. They also discovered
<v Speaker 1>that the clumps were all within a smooth, rotating disk
<v Speaker 1>of gas, with parts of the disk moving toward us
<v Speaker 1>and others moving away, just as you would expect from
<v Speaker 1>a spinning galaxy. This galaxy is not some rare extreme case.
<v Speaker 1>Its size, mass, star formation rate, and chemical makeup all
<v Speaker 1>fit with what astronomers consider a normal galaxy for its time.
<v Speaker 1>That means many other galaxies that look smooth to us
<v Speaker 1>right now could actually be hiding similar clumps, invisible until
<v Speaker 1>we have the tools to see them. The discovery is
<v Speaker 1>challenging current theories of galaxy formation. Computer simulations do not
<v Speaker 1>predict that so many large clumps should exist in early
<v Speaker 1>rotating galaxies. This suggests that our ideas about how galaxies
<v Speaker 1>build themselves and how energy and matter interact in their
<v Speaker 1>early stages may need to be rethought. The cosmic grapes
<v Speaker 1>give scientists a rare look at the building blocks of
<v Speaker 1>galaxies in the young universe. Researchers now want to find
<v Speaker 1>out whether many other galaxies from that era looked like this,
<v Speaker 1>which could change our whole picture of how galaxies grew
<v Speaker 1>in the universe's early days. Some Sun like stars are
<v Speaker 1>born tilted. Scientists from several universities discover that many stars
<v Speaker 1>similar to our Sun are born with their rotation axis
<v Speaker 1>tilted compared to the disks of gas and dust around them,
<v Speaker 1>which are the birthplaces of planets. These disks, called protoplanetary disks,
<v Speaker 1>are present around all young stars, but until recently, little
<v Speaker 1>was known about how their orientation compares to the star's
<v Speaker 1>own spin. For a long time, people assume stars and
<v Speaker 1>their discs star off aligned, based on the fact that
<v Speaker 1>our Sun's spin axis is mostly aligned with the orbits
<v Speaker 1>of the planets in our Solar system. This new research
<v Speaker 1>challenge is that assumption. Astronomers have known since the nineteen nineties,
<v Speaker 1>when the first planets around other stars were found, that
<v Speaker 1>some planets have orbits at steep angles compared to the
<v Speaker 1>spin of their stars. This was surprising and led scientists
<v Speaker 1>to propose explanations. One idea was that after planets formed,
<v Speaker 1>gravitational effects from a passing star, a companion star or
<v Speaker 1>a massive planet far from the star could tilt the orbits.
<v Speaker 1>The main belief was that stars and planets star aligned
<v Speaker 1>and these tilts happened later over billions of years, but
<v Speaker 1>there was also the possibility that the misalignment was present
<v Speaker 1>from birth. To investigate, researchers studied forty nine young isolated
<v Speaker 1>stars with their protoplanetary discs using data from the Alma telescope,
<v Speaker 1>the Tests based telescope and the Kepler K two mission.
<v Speaker 1>They measured the angles between the stars rotation and their discs.
<v Speaker 1>They found that about two were aligned, but about one
<v Speaker 1>third were tilted from the start. This means that some
<v Speaker 1>planetary systems don't need complicated explanations involving later interactions. They
<v Speaker 1>simply form tilted. There are still cases where complex gravitational
<v Speaker 1>interactions are needed to explain extreme tilts, but this study
<v Speaker 1>shows that our Sun's slight six degree tilt could just
<v Speaker 1>be a natural variation from its birth. The next step
<v Speaker 1>is to figure out why some stars and disks are
<v Speaker 1>born tilted while others are not. Since the reason for
<v Speaker 1>this remains a mystery before n