Webb Detects 3-Million-Light-Year-Long Filament of Galaxies in Early Universe

Galaxies are strung along filaments in the vast cosmic web, which also contains enormous voids. Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered an early strand of this structure — a long, narrow filament of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the Big Bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a luminous quasar called J0305-3150. The same team has also probed the properties of eight quasars in the early Universe. They’ve determined that the galaxies’ central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion solar masses.

“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is,” said Dr. Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure.”

“This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar,” added Dr. Feige Wang, also from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The discovery was made as part of the ASPIRE project, whose main goal is to study the cosmic environments of the earliest black holes.

In total, ASPIRE will observe 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years after the Big Bang, a time known as the Epoch of Reionization.

“The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves,” said Dr. Joseph Hennawi, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“ASPIRE aims to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure.”

In their research, the astronomers also analyzed the properties of eight quasars in the early Universe.

They confirmed that the central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass of our Sun.

“To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied,” Dr. Wang said.

“First, you need to start growing from a massive seed black hole.”

“Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime.”

“These unprecedented observations are providing important clues about how black holes are assembled,” added Dr. Jinyi Yang, also from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“We have learned that these black holes are situated in massive young galaxies that provide the reservoir of fuel for their growth.”

Webb also provided the best evidence yet of how early supermassive black holes potentially regulate the formation of stars in their galaxies.

While supermassive black holes accrete matter, they also can power tremendous outflows of material.

These winds can extend far beyond the black hole itself, on a galactic scale, and can have a significant impact on the formation of stars.

“Strong winds from black holes can suppress the formation of stars in the host galaxy,” Dr. Yang said.

“Such winds have been observed in the nearby Universe but have never been directly observed in the Epoch of Reionization.”

“The scale of the wind is related to the structure of the quasar. In the Webb observations, we are seeing that such winds existed in the early Universe.”

The findings appear in two papers in the June 29, 2023 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Feige Wang et al. 2023. A SPectroscopic Survey of Biased Halos in the Reionization Era (ASPIRE): JWST Reveals a Filamentary Structure around a z=6.61 Quasar. ApJL 951, L4; two: 10.3847/2041-8213/accd6f

Jinyi Yang et al. 2023. A SPectroscopic Survey of Biased Halos in the Reionization Era (ASPIRE): A First Look at the Rest-frame Optical Spectra of z> 6.5 Quasars Using JWST. ApJL 951, L5; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/acc9c8