Bizarre, Evolutionary Missing Link Uncovered in Hubble Deep Survey of Galaxies
The universe is so saturated with galaxies that even the weirdest things can go unnoticed for years after Hubble Space Telescope "deep-exposure" observations are taken. In sort of an intergalactic Where's Waldo, an international team of astronomers uncovered in Hubble archival data a mysterious red dot nearly in the middle of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North). As innocuous as it looks, it could be a rare missing link between some of the very earliest galaxies and the birth of supermassive black holes. The object, referred to as GNz7q, existed when the universe was just a toddler, only 750 million years after the big bang. The mixture of radiation from the object cannot be attributed to star formation alone. The best explanation is that it is a growing black hole shrouded in dust. Given time, the black hole will emerge from its dusty cocoon as a brilliant quasar, an intense beacon of light at the heart of an early galaxy. The pioneering Hubble telescope has provided a unique target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to use its spectroscopic instruments to study objects like GNz7q in unprecedented detail.
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