James Webb detects the oldest supermassive black hole ever observed
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NASA / ESA / CSA / Steve Finkelstein, Micaela Bagley, Rebecca Larson (UT Austin)
A team of scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole ever observed.
The black hole at the center of a galaxy designated CEERS 1019 is so far away that it existed only 570 million years after the Big Bang. It is the earliest and least massive supermassive black hole ever observed.
The new observation is yet another breathtaking example of Webb's impressive capacity to peer into the ancient past and shed new light on the early formation of the cosmos.
The oldest active supermassive black hole ever observed
The team behind the discovery also identified two smaller black holes that existed 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang and 11 galaxies that existed when the universe was between 470 million and 675 million years old. They published their findings across several initial papers in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The new data came from Webb's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, led by Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. The survey uses a combination of Webb's near- and mid-infrared images and spectra data.
"Looking at this distant object with this telescope is a lot like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies near our own," Rebecca Larson, a recent Ph.D. graduate at UT Austin who led the study, explained in a press statement. "There are so many spectral lines to analyze!"
And it simply wouldn't have been possible without James Webb's state-of-the-art instruments. "With other telescopes, these targets look like ordinary star-forming galaxies, not active supermassive black holes," Finkelstein said.
Measuring an ancient black hole
Given how early on in the universe it existed, CEERS 1019's black hole is surprisingly small, weighing in at 9 million solar masses.
Early supermassive black holes have weighed far more, typically having more than one billion times the mass of our Sun.
The black hole within CEERS 1019 is comparable to Sagitarrius*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which was recently imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope team. Sagitarrius* has a mass of 4.6 million times that of the Sun.
Using the JWST data, the scientists were able to determine how much gas the black hole is ingesting and the rate at which the galaxy is forming new stars. They discovered that the black hole is ingesting gas at the highest limit it can while still allowing the universe to produce new leads.
"Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical," Finkelstein explained. "With Webb, not only can we see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, we can now start to accurately measure them. That’s the tremendous power of this telescope."
James Webb continues to alter our perception of the early universe by showing us the earliest galaxies ever observed by humans as it approaches the first anniversary of its science operations, which began in July last year.
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