A group of scientists has discovered the oldest black hole so far. It is estimated that it was created just about 470 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery was made possible thanks to the combined technology of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, both managed by NASA.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Therefore, the age of this black hole is 13.2 billion years. In other words, It emerged when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
The black hole was captured at an early stage of growth that has never been witnessed before, where its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy. Their discovery may help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes formed.
The oldest black hole so far is located in a galaxy called UHZ1, which is in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. And there is another fact that surprised researchers: it is huge.
The team found strong evidence that the black hole was born massive. It is 10 times larger than the black hole in our Milky Way. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 100 million suns, depending on the brightness and energy captured by X-rays.
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The mass range of this black hole It is similar to that of all the stars in the galaxy where it lives. This is in stark contrast to the black holes at the centers of galaxies in the nearby universe, which typically contain only about a tenth of the mass of the stars in their host galaxy.
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the study published this Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that increased the amount of light we detected,” Bogdan added. This magnification effect is known as gravitational lensing.
The existence of a massive black hole like this had been previously raised by Priyamvada Natarajan, of Yale University, in her theoretical predictions published in 2017. «We believe that this is the first detection of a large black hole and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” said Natarajan.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The James Webb Space Telescope, also from the US agency, is the world’s main space scientific observatory. It began operating more than a year ago. In this short time, it has already begun to solve great mysteries related to the origin of our universe.