Almost every galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its center. So why is it so hard to find young black holes actively feeding?
Every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, has a monster lurking in its heart — a supermassive black hole. Despite how common these gargantuan objects are, astronomers are still trying to figure out how the universe's supermassive black holes were born, and how they grew to their humongous sizes.
Teenage SMBHs grow rapidly, eating up material around them, and appear to us as a bright blob known as an active galactic nucleus . Astronomers generally agree our galaxy's SMBH has long since quieted, leaving its active years in its past. Most of the monsters' growth spurts actually happened around 7 to 11 billion years ago.
Astronomers previously thought that even"average"-sized black holes like the one in the Milky Way would show signs of their rapid growth, since the large AGN observed previously were clearly growing up fast. Even with the massive increase in sensitivity from JWST's instruments to peer down to smaller galaxies, though, they couldn't find more really active teenage AGN. In fact, the population of active black holes was far fewer than previous estimates have suggested.
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