“Supermassive Black Hole in Ancient Galaxy Found to be Five Times Larger than Expected”

Astronomers say the supermassive black hole found at the heart of an ancient galaxy is five times larger than expected in relation to the number of stars it contains.

Researchers discovered a supermassive black hole in a galaxy known as GS-9209 that is located 25 billion light years from Earth, making it one of the most distant ever observed and recorded.

The team at the University of Edinburgh used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy and uncover new details about its formation and history.

Adam Carnal, who led the effort, said the telescope – the most powerful telescope ever built – showed how galaxies grew “bigger and older” than astronomers expected in the universe’s first billion years.

“This work gives us our first truly detailed view of the characteristics of these early galaxies, with a detailed chart of the history of GS-9209, which managed to form as many stars as our Milky Way in just 800 million years after the Big Bang,” he said.

The “supermassive black hole” at the center of GS-9209 is a “huge shock” that confirms the theory that such a massive black hole was responsible for stopping star formation in early galaxies, Karnal said.

“The evidence we are seeing for supermassive black holes is completely unexpected,” said Karnal. “These are the kinds of details we couldn’t see without JWST.”

GS-9209 was discovered in 2004 by Karina Capote, a former PhD student in Edinburgh and now professor of observational cosmology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

While GS-9209 contains nearly as many stars as our home galaxy, with a combined mass equivalent to 40 billion suns, it is only one tenth the size of the Milky Way. This is the oldest example of a galaxy that has stopped forming stars, the researchers said.

Supermassive black holes can stop star formation because their growth releases large amounts of high-energy radiation, which can heat and expel gas from galaxies. Galaxies need huge clouds of gas and dust to collapse under their own gravity, thus forming new stars.

“the truth [that the black hole] So massive means it must have been very active in the past, with so much falling gas, that it would have shone very strongly like a quasar,” said Karnal. “All the energy from the black hole at the center of the galaxy would have disturbed the entire galaxy, seriously, preventing the gas from collapsing to form new stars.”

more information Published in Nature.