[NTD News, Beijing time, April 8, 2024]Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover the oldest known black hole, more than 13 billion light-years away from the Earth, and its history can be traced back to just 4 years after the Big Bang. Billions of years. Just last November, astronomers discovered the oldest known black hole at the time, dating back 470 million years after the Big Bang.
The black hole is at the center of a galaxy called GN-z11, which was the oldest known galaxy when it was discovered in 2016. What shocked researchers about the black hole at its center was not its age but its size.
“What’s surprising is not its age, but the fact that it was so large so early in the universe, which is difficult to use,” said study co-author Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. Standard theory to explain it,” he told Newsweek on January 17.
Black holes are incomprehensible amounts of matter crammed into a relatively small space. Because it is so dense, its gravity is strong enough to pull in anything that comes close to it, including light. Therefore, black holes cannot be directly observed, and scientists can only see the impact they have on their surroundings.
In the case of the GN-z11 galaxy, researchers have noticed that it is unusually bright. Maiolino told NPR that to achieve such brightness “you need to pack a lot of stars into such a small volume.”
But observations from the Webb telescope show that the galaxy’s bright light comes not from stars, but from hot gas swirling around the black hole as it is sucked in. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature on January 17.
“These authors present compelling evidence that there is a black hole[at the center of the galaxy],” Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan told NPR. was not involved in the new study.
The newly discovered black hole has a mass of about 1.6 million times that of the sun. According to a statement from the University of Cambridge, scientists previously believed that black holes gradually grew to their today’s enormous size. But if the newly discovered black hole grew according to the standard model, it would take about a billion years to grow to its size. Therefore, it either starts out much larger than expected, or it grows much faster than expected.
“This black hole basically eats the entire Sun’s mass every five years,” Maiolino told NPR. “It’s actually much faster than we thought was possible.”
The “Live Science” website wrote that according to accepted existing theories, the reason why early black holes became huge so quickly may have been caused by the sudden collapse of huge gas clouds or the merger of many stars and black holes.
“Understanding where black holes come from has always been a mystery, but now the mystery seems to be deepening,” Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London who was not involved in the study, told The Guardian in December 2023. The paper was published as a preprint at the time. “Using the power of the Webb telescope to look back in time, these results show that some black holes grew at an alarming rate in the young universe, much faster than we expected.” ◇
(Reprinted from The Epoch Times/Editor: Ye Ping)
