Scientists used the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Webb Space Telescope to discover a black hole in the UHZ1 galaxy, which was born 470 million years after the Big Bang and is 13.2 billion light-years away from Earth. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand)
[The Epoch Times, November 10, 2023](Compiled and reported by Epoch Times reporter Linda) Astronomers said that they have just discovered the most distant supermassive black hole to date. This was observed with the help of a “cosmic magnifying glass” or “gravitational lensing”. This happens when a massive celestial body creates a large curvature of spacetime in its vicinity, such that light around it bends. The new discovery provides useful information for understanding the early universe.
The black hole is located in the UHZ1 galaxy in the direction of galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is approximately 13.2 billion years old. The research team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to jointly search for telltale signatures of a growing black hole. Black holes only began to form 470 million years after the Big Bang, and 470 million years is about 3% of the 13.7 billion years of the universe. The galaxy is 13.2 billion light-years away from Earth, which is farther away than the cluster itself.
Astronomers can tell that the black hole is so young because it is so massive, while the black hole evaporates over time. According to NASA, most black holes at the centers of galaxies have a mass of about one-tenth the total mass of the stars in their host galaxy. This early black hole is growing to a mass equivalent to the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have never witnessed a black hole at this stage before, and studying it could help explain how the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. Published in “Nature·AstronomyThe findings are detailed in a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“We need the Webb telescope to search for this extremely distant galaxy and the Chandra Observatory to search for the supermassive black holes within it,” study co-author and astronomer Akos Bogdan said in a statement. Gedan is affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“We also used a cosmic magnifying glass to enhance the amount of light detected,” Bogdan added. This magnifying effect is called gravitational lensing. The team conducted two weeks of X-ray observations at the Chandra Observatory. They saw intense X-ray emission from the galaxy – a sign of supermassive black holes. Light from galaxies and X-rays from gas surrounding supermassive black holes are amplified by hot gas and dark matter from galaxy clusters. This effect acts like a “cosmic magnifying glass” that enhances the infrared light signal detected by JWST, allowing Chandra to see faint X-ray sources.
“Once a black hole is formed, its growth rate is subject to physical limitations, but those with greater natural mass have the upper hand. It’s like planting a sapling. It doesn’t take long for the sapling to grow into a big tree. This is better than planting a sapling. The next tree’s seeds are produced much faster,” study co-author Andy Goulding, an astronomer at Princeton University, said in a statement.
Observing this phenomenon could help astronomers answer why some supermassive black holes accumulate huge amounts of mass so soon after the Big Bang. There are two opposing theories about the origin of these supermassive black holes – the “light seed theory” and the “heavy seed theory.” The former suggests that a star collapses into a black hole and then grows into a supermassive black hole over time, while the latter suggests that a giant gas cloud (rather than a single star) collapses and condenses to form a supermassive black hole. This newly discovered black hole can confirm the latter, the “heavy seed theory.”
“We believe this is the first discovery of a supermassive black hole and the best yet,” study co-author Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University, said in a statement. Evidence that some black holes formed from giant clouds of gas. For the first time, we see a brief phase in which a supermassive black hole weighed as much as all the stars in its galaxy before shrinking.”
The team plans to use this data and more from Webb and other space telescopes to better understand the early universe. ◇#
Editor in charge: Ye Ziwei
