The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered lonely quasars in the early universe, with "empty larders" that defy theories surrounding their growth to monster sizes.
An image of an ancient supermassive black hole powered quasar in the early universe as seen by the JWST Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have peered back 13 billion years to discover surprisingly lonely supermassive black hole-powered quasars. The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) observations are confusing because isolated black holes should struggle to gather enough mass to reach supermassive status, especially just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The discovery further muddies the waters when it comes to the puzzle of how some black holes grew to masses equivalent to millions or even billions of suns when the universe was less than a billion years old. The findings came about after a team of scientists used the JWST to study the environments of five of the earliest known quasars, which formed when the cosmos was between 600 and 700 million years old. The team found that the surroundings of these quasars, known as "quasar fields," were surprisingly varied. Some were the densely packed environments scientists predict, but others were sparsely populated "empty-larders" that would struggle to feed the growth of supermassive black holes. "Contrary to previous belief, we find, on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere," Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "It's difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from." Related: Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky Ways Quasars need full larders Supermassive black holes are believed to lurk at the hearts of all large galaxies in the relatively modern universe. Because no star is large enough to collapse and black holes with such monstrous masses, scientists know supermassive black holes must form in different…