Using NASA telescopes, astronomers have discovered the most distant and thus the oldest black hole. It is also interesting that this supermassive cosmic object is only in the early stages of growth – at the time it was observed, it was still young, a cosmic toddler in layman’s terms. While black holes normally have more mass than their galaxies, this one is similarly massive to its host.
Scientists are excited about the results of this observation, as they have never had the chance to observe such an immature singularity. They believe it will help them explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.
Astronomers used a combination of data from two powerful observatories: the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope to discover this object. Thanks to them, a team of scientists managed to find traces of a growing black hole from the time of only 470 million years after the big bang.
Looking into the past through a gravitational lens
“We needed Webb to discover this remarkably distant galaxy and then Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” commented Akos Bogdan of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, who led the study. He described it in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy. They also took advantage of the so-called gravitational lensing effect, where the light around supermassive cosmic objects bends in such a way that it acts as a magnifying glass of cosmic dimensions.
The black hole in the galaxy, named UHZ1, lies 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. Since a light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year, this means that scientists were looking thirteen billion years into the distant past and seeing the singularity as it was then—that is, when our universe was still in its infancy and had only three percent of his current age.
The Chandra probe, which sees X-rays invisible to the eye, has detected the presence of superheated gas there, which emits this radiation strongly. This is a typical sign of a growing supermassive black hole. Astronomers were able to observe everything in great detail, because the light from this galaxy and the X-rays from the gas around its supermassive black hole were seen approximately four times larger, thanks to the gravitational lensing effect described above.
According to NASA, this discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes could reach their colossal masses so soon after the big bang. For now, it is not entirely clear how they were actually formed in the conditions of that time – whether by the collapse of giant and dense clouds of gas, or by the explosions of the first stars of our universe.
“There are physical limits to how fast black holes can grow after their formation, but those born more massive have a head start. It’s like when you plant a sapling, it takes less time to grow into a full-sized tree than if you started with just a seedling,” described Andy Goulding of Princeton University.
And a new study has described that the newly discovered black hole has already been born as a cosmic Boy. It looks like its mass is equivalent to about a hundred million Suns.
2023-11-09 10:36:22
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