01:12 PM Monday, December 18, 2023
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest black hole ever, an ancient monster with the mass of 1.6 million suns, hiding 13 billion years in the universe’s past.
The James Webb Space Telescope camera was able to look back in time to the beginnings of the universe and observe the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy that arose GN-z11 only 440 million years after the beginning of the universe.
This space-time rip is one of countless black holes that devoured themselves during cosmic dawn, the period about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe began glowing for a billion years.
It is not clear how cosmic vortices inflated in size so quickly after the beginning of the universe. But the search for an answer could help explain how the supermassive black holes that exist today grow to such astonishing sizes, according to the Live Science magazine website.
Lead author Roberto Maiolino, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, said black holes in the early universe “could not have grown quietly and gently as many black holes do at the present time. They had to face some strange birth or formation.”
Astronomers believe that black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars. They grow by constantly devouring gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As they feed, friction causes the material spiraling inside the black holes’ jaws to heat up, emitting light that can be detected by telescopes — turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei.
The most extreme AGNs are quasars, supermassive black holes billions of times heavier than the Sun, which fire off their gaseous cocoons in bursts of light trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars.
Because light travels at a constant speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper scientists look into the universe, the farther light they intercept and the farther back in time they travel.
To discover the black hole in the new study, astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras — the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb space telescope and the near-infrared camera — and used spectrometers built into the cameras to analyze the light. Into it.
By dissecting these faint flashes from the universe’s early years, they found an unexpected spike between frequencies within the light, a key sign that the hot matter surrounding the black hole was emitting faint trails of light across the universe.
