Primordial quasars fueled by black holes.

Space.com reports on a new discovery of very ancient heavenly bodies thanks to observations by the James Webb Space Telescope. Researchers from NOIRlab have found a pair of quasars powered by supermmassive black holes in an arrangement that shouldn’t exist:

The compact quasar pair, spotted with the aid of the Gemini North telescope, has been designated J1602+4228AB and nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, which means “Two celestial bodies of fathomless powerful darkness in the brilliance of heat reincarnating energy into the universe.” The compact quasar pair is seen as it was 900 million years after the Big Bang at a time when such supermassive black holes should not have had time to grow to such tremendous masses.

Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua isn’t just the oldest and most distant quasar pairing ever seen. There is just 18,100 light-years, or roughly one-fifth the diameter of the Milky Way, between the supermassive black holes, which have masses of 1.5 billion and 400 million times that of the sun. That makes Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua the most compact quasar pair found during a period of the universe’s history known as Cosmic Dawn, shortly after the birth of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes.

“There is no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early in the age of our universe, much less two,” research team leader Silvia Onorato of the NOIRLab said in a statement.

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Finding such objects in the recent cosmic history of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe isn’t troubling, though finding compact pairs of them is still extremely rare. Such pairs should be common because the merger of galaxies that brings together supermassive black holes is frequent. That should lead to an abundance of pairs of quasars with a separation less than the typical size of a galaxy.

There are three reasons this has proven tricky. Firstly, the “quasar phase” of a supermassive black hole is relatively short on cosmic terms. Secondly, even relatively close quasar pairs are very far away, making them faint and hard to detect with ground-based telescopes. Finally, at such great distances and with such a small separation between the two supermassive black holes, the individual members of a quasar pair are hard to individually resolve.

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The trouble arises before the universe was 1 billion years. That is because, according to current models, black holes should need at least 1 billion years to feed and merge enough to reach masses millions or billions of times that of the sun.

Yet, since it began operations in 2022, the JWST has been routinely discovering supermassive black holes powering quasars as early as 400 million years after the Big Bang. If that wasn’t confusing enough, the discovery of Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the third quasar pair seen at Cosmic Dawn, could really break current models.

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You can read more of the Hawaiian observations here, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.