According to the “Daily Mail” report on the 12th, since NASA launched JWST in 2021, it hopes to understand the origin of the universe and human beings by studying every stage of the history of the universe. JWST lived up to expectations, discovering the oldest galaxies in the universe and ancient planets that should not exist in theory.
JWST also discovered the oldest supermassive black hole, formed 13.2 billion years ago. The gigantic black hole, the oldest ever discovered, is located at the center of the CEERS 1019 galaxy, 570 million years after the birth of the universe. The previous record was a black hole discovered in 2021, which formed 13 billion years ago.
The oldest black hole ever discovered lies at the center of the galaxy CEERS 1019, dating back 570 million years after the birth of the universe. (Internet screenshot)
Scientists are baffled by how these black holes formed so quickly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, since most black holes emerged a billion years ago.
A team of researchers led by the University of Austin determined that CEERS 1019’s black hole is about 9 million times the mass of the sun, and that it continues to eat and grow from surrounding interstellar gas and dust. The black hole of CEERS 1019, more similar to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is 4.6 million times the mass of the sun.
However, CEERS 1019’s black hole is also much smaller than most objects over a billion times more massive.
A black hole forms when the center of a very massive star collapses, leaving a vacuum from which no light can enter or escape.
Scientists have also discovered two other black holes in the galaxies CEERS 746 and CEERS 2782, which are slightly larger and weigh 10 million times the mass of the sun.
Two other black holes, slightly larger and weighing 10 million times the mass of the sun, have been found in the galaxies CEERS 746 and CEERS 2782. (Internet screenshot)
These three black holes are called CEERS “lightweights” by astronomers, and they believe they can reshape people’s understanding of how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the first billion years of the universe.
“This is critical because the universe is shrouded in a dense ‘fog’ during this period known as the Reionization Era,” the researchers shared in a press release.
In the universe at this time, neutral gas has been ionized over hundreds of millions of years, making it transparent to ultraviolet light. What caused this period is unknown, but astronomers hope JWST will be able to answer that question.
“Researchers have long known that there must have been lower-mass black holes in the early universe,” said Dale Kocevski of the Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Webb is the first to be able to so clearly Observatories that caught them. Now we think that lower mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be found.”
Before Webb, all three black holes were too faint to be detected, according to astronomer Steven Finkelstein. Using other telescopes, these objects look like ordinary star-forming galaxies rather than active supermassive black holes.
“Until now, the study of objects in the early universe has been mostly theoretical,” Finkelstein said. But through the JWST’s sensitive spectroscopy, researchers were able to measure the precise distances of galaxies in the early universe and thus their ages.
“With Webb, we can not only see extremely distant black holes and galaxies, but now we can start to measure them precisely. That’s the power of this telescope.”
