JAKARTA – For space lovers, black holes, aka black holes, are certainly not something new. This astronomical object has a very strong gravitational force so that it can attract anything that is or passes nearby.
Not long ago, researchers with the help of the super-sophisticated James Webb telescope managed to find the giant active black hole farthest from Earth.
The black hole is in the CEERS 1019 galaxy, which has existed since the beginning of the universe, which was formed about 570 million years after the big bang phenomenon.
Despite being called a giant, the black hole is slightly smaller than any other black hole known to have formed in the early universe.
“CEERS 1019 is not only famous for how long it has been around, but also for how small the black hole weighs,” wrote on NASA’s official website.
“This black hole is about 9 million solar masses, far less than other black holes that were also present in the early universe and detected by other telescopes,” he continued.
Furthermore, it is stated that the black hole is more like the black hole in our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is only 4.6 million times the size of the sun.
The black hole is also not as bright as other giant black holes that have been detected before – making research on it even more interesting.
“Seeing distant objects with this telescope [James Webb] very similar to looking at data from black holes in galaxies near us,” said Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, who led the discovery.
“There are so many spectral lines to analyze!” he added.
With the James Webb telescope, the research team was able to decipher not only which emission in the spectrum came from the black hole and which came from its host galaxy.
They can also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine the galaxy’s star formation rate.
From the observations made, researchers found that CEERS 1019 swallowed as much gas as possible while also producing a new star.
Visually, CEERS 1019 is said to appear as three bright blobs instead of a circular disc.
“We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at this distance,” said CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
“A merger of galaxies could be partly responsible for triggering activity in these galactic black holes, and it could also lead to increased star formation,” he continued.
According to Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas who leads the Webb’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, research on astronomical objects that formed in the early universe is largely theoretical–and these are just a few of the first groundbreaking findings from the survey. .
“With Webb, not only can we see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, we can now begin to measure them accurately. That’s the incredible power of this telescope,” he said.
2023-07-10 03:11:59
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