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Astronomers have discovered the oldest supermassive black hole to date, dating back roughly to the time of the Big Bang.
The black hole, which is estimated to be 10 to 100 million times larger than our Sun, is located 13.2 billion light-years away in the galaxy UHZ-1.
This means its light has traveled 13.2 billion years to reach our space telescopes, making it a stunning snapshot of the ancient past.
This also means that they formed only 500 million years after the Big Bang (13.7 billion years ago), when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
Although it is not one of the most massive black holes ever, it is unusually massive for such an early stage of growth and was “Born huge,” researchers say.
Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays using the Chandra and James Webb space telescopes. X-ray emission is a clear sign of the presence of a supermassive black hole. These images show the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster behind UHZ1, in X-ray from Chandra and infrared data from Webb, as well as close-ups of the UHZ1 black hole’s host galaxy.
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images taken of the UHZ-1 galaxy using the observatory’s NIRCam
How the first black holes formed in the early universe has been a matter of long-standing debate among astronomers.
But the fact that this black hole is so old with such a large mass gives astronomers a crucial clue.
Researchers believe it formed directly from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas, based on X-rays detected by telescopes including James Webb.
The study’s author said: “Finally, the discovery of a black hole that was very large, when the universe was very young, tells us that the black hole must have been very large when it initially formed, perhaps from the direct collapse of a huge gas cloud.” Andy Golding at Princeton University in New Jersey.
“The black hole has a very short growth time, which means it either grew unusually fast or the black hole was born larger.”
Black holes, the inspiration for science fiction movies, are regions of space-time where the gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape.
They act as intense sources of gravity swirling around dust and gas, as well as planets and even other black holes.
They are often described as “destructive monsters” because they tear apart stars, consuming anything that gets too close to them, and capturing light.
Black holes act as condensed sources of gravity that swirl around dust and gas, as well as planets and even other black holes (artistic illustration)
Researchers discovered the black hole using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (shown here)
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with a mass of more than 100,000 and a mass of up to 10 billion times the mass of our Sun.
The researchers estimated the mass of this particular black hole to be between 10 and 100 million suns based on the brightness and energy of the X-rays.
This mass is similar to the mass of all the stars in the galaxy it lives in, but that’s something of an astronomical oddity.
Normally, black holes at the centers of other galaxies contain only about a tenth of a percent the mass of their host galaxy’s stars.
The research team detected the X-rays using two NASA space telescopes – the James Webb, the most powerful space telescope ever that can “look through time,” and the quarter-century-old Chandra Observatory.
Chandra, launched in 1999, is 100 times less sensitive to X-ray sources than any previous X-ray telescope.
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy, and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said study author Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Chandra images revealed the presence of extremely hot, X-ray-emitting gases in this galaxy, a trademark of a growing supermassive black hole.
Chandra’s observations over two weeks revealed the presence of extremely hot, X-ray-emitting gases in this galaxy, a trademark of a growing supermassive black hole.
The team was helped by a magnifying effect known as gravitational lensing – where the gravitational field of a massive object amplifies and distorts light coming from another object behind it.
Light from the galaxy and X-rays from the gas around the black hole are amplified approximately fourfold by “intervening matter” due to gravitational lensing.
This had the effect of enhancing the infrared signal detected by Webb and allowing Chandra to detect the faint X-ray source.
Overall, the results are consistent with predictions made in 2017 about a “supermassive black hole” that formed directly from the collapse of a massive cloud of gas, according to the team.
“The combination of this high black hole mass and the large black hole-to-galaxy stellar mass ratio just 500 million years after the Big Bang was predicted theoretically,” they say.
Chandra, launched in 1999, is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope.
They believe that other theories about how black holes form, such as the death of the first massive stars, can be ruled out because they could not produce a black hole large enough to explain this one.
The researchers plan to use these and other Webb results and data from other telescopes to fill out a larger picture of the early universe.
“Data from the James Webb Space Telescope are rapidly changing our understanding of the early universe by enabling the discovery of large samples of faint, distant galaxies deep within that era,” the researchers concluded.
The study was published in the journal Nature astronomy.
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