James Webb telescope discovers oldest black hole in universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the oldest black hole ever seen, an ancient monster with the mass of 1.6 million suns lurking 13 billion years in the universe’s past.

The James Webb Space Telescope, whose cameras enable it to look back in time to our universe’s beginnings, spotted the super-massive black hole at the centre of the infant galaxy GN-z11 just 440 million years after the universe began.

And the space-time rupture isn’t alone, it’s one of countless black holes that gorged themselves to terrifying scales during the cosmic dawn — the period about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe began glowing for a billion years.

How the cosmic whirlpools ballooned in scale so rapidly after the universe began isn’t clear. But looking for an answer could help explain how today’s super-massive black holes — which anchor entire galaxies including our Milky Way — grew to such mind-boggling sizes. The researchers published their findings earlier this year to the preprint database arXiv, but the research has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Black holes in the early universe “can’t grow quietly and gently as many black holes do in the local [present-day] universe,” lead-author Roberto Maiolino, a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. “They must experience some peculiar birth or formation, and some peculiar growth.”

Closer to the present-day, astronomers believe black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars. But however they come to be, they grow by ceaselessly gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As they feast, friction causes the material spiraling into the black holes’ maws to heat up, and they emit light that can be detected by telescopes — turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN).

The most extreme AGN are quasars, super-massive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the sun and shed their gaseous cocoons with light blasts trillions of times more luminous than the brightest stars.

Because light travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper that scientists look into the universe, the more remote light they intercept and the further back in time they see. To spot the black hole in the new study, the astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras — the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near Infrared Camera — and used the cameras’ built-in spectrographs to break down the light into its component frequencies.

By deconstructing these faint glimmers from the universe’s earliest years, they found an unexpected spike among the frequencies contained within the light — a key sign that the hot material around a black hole was beaming out faint traces of light across the universe.

The most popular explanations for how these early black holes grew so fast are that they formed from the sudden collapse of giant gas clouds or that they came from many mergers between clumps of stars and black holes.

(Live Science)

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