The oldest black hole in the universe has been discovered: it is over 13 billion years old
A black hole has been discovered that is the oldest ever observed, 400 million years after the Big Bang to which it dates back, well over 13 billion years ago. The discovery by an international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is reported in the journal Nature.
“The results represent a major advance,” said Roberto Maiolino of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology in Cambridge and lead author of the study. The fact that this amazingly massive black hole, which is a few million times the mass of the Sun, existed so early in the universe challenges our previous assumptions about the formation and growth of black holes.
Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes, which are located at the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way, grew to their current size over billions of years. However, the size of this newly discovered black hole suggests that they could form in a different way: they could be “born big,” or eat matter five times faster than previously thought possible. According to standard models, supermassive black holes form from the remnants of dead stars, which can collapse to form a black hole with a mass hundreds of times greater than that of the Sun. If it were to evolve as expected, this newly identified black hole would take about a billion years to reach the observed size. However, the universe was less than a billion years old when this black hole was discovered.
It is still very early in the universe to see such a massive black hole, so we need to think about other ways it could form.” (Roberto Maiolino)
“The very first galaxies were extremely rich in gas, so they would have been a hotbed of black holes,” Maiolino continued. Like all black holes, this young black hole is devouring material from its parent galaxy to fuel its growth. However, this ancient black hole devours matter much more violently than its later brothers. The young parent galaxy, called GN-z11, glows because of such an energetic black hole at its center. Black holes cannot be observed directly, but are detected by the glow of a swirling accretion disk that forms near the edges of a black hole. The gas in the accretion disk becomes extremely hot and begins to glow and emit ultraviolet energy. This powerful glow allows astronomers to detect black holes. GN-z11 is a compact galaxy, about 100 times smaller than the Milky Way, but the black hole is likely affecting its evolution. When black holes consume too much gas, they push it away like ultra-fast wind.
This “wind” could block the star formation process and slowly kill the galaxy. but it would also destroy the black hole itself as it would also deprive it of its food source. “The giant leap forward that JWST has enabled makes this the most exciting moment of my career,” said Maiolino.
“It’s a new era: the gigantic jump in sensitivity, especially in the infrared, is like going from Galileo’s telescope to a modern telescope in one night,” Maiolino continued. “Before Webb became operational, I thought that the universe might not have much to reveal beyond what we could see with the Hubble Space Telescope,” Maiolino said.
“But,” Maiolino added, “that wasn’t the case at all: the universe very generously showed us what it was doing, and that’s just the beginning.” “The sensitivity of JWST means that even older black holes could be found in the coming months and years,” concluded Maiolino, who along with his team hopes to use future JWST observations to try to detect smaller black hole signatures to find that could help solve the mystery of the different ways black holes could form and whether they start big or grow quickly.
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