James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Farthest Active Supermassive Black Hole
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made a groundbreaking discovery, uncovering the most remote active supermassive black hole known to date. Situated in the CEERS 1019 galaxy, this black hole existed about 570 million years after the Big Bang. What makes this finding even more significant is that the black hole is smaller than any other identified from the early universe.
The discovery of this black hole and its unique characteristics could revolutionize our understanding of black hole formation and the evolution of the cosmos. It provides solid evidence that smaller black holes existed in the early universe, a longstanding belief among researchers.
The stunning findings come from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, led by Steven Finkelstein, an astronomy professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Utilizing JWST’s high-resolution near- and mid-infrared imagery and spectral data, the research team was able to identify not only the remote supermassive black hole but also two smaller black holes that existed approximately 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang.
Additionally, the CEERS Survey has identified eleven galaxies from a time when the universe was between 470 million and 675 million years old. These galaxies are rapidly forming stars, but they have not yet accumulated the same chemical complexity found in closer galaxies.
The remarkable discoveries have been published in several initial papers in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Rebecca Larson, a recent Ph.D. graduate at UT Austin, who led the study, expressed excitement about the findings, stating, “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. There are so many spectral lines to analyze!”
CEERS 1019 is not only significant for its antiquity but also because of the relatively low mass of its black hole. Weighing in at around 9 million solar masses, it is significantly less massive than other black holes from the early universe. The black hole in CEERS 1019 is more similar to the one at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, which is 4.6 million times the mass of the sun.
The presence of this smaller black hole in the early universe raises fascinating questions about its formation and how it came to exist so rapidly after the universe’s inception. With JWST’s powerful capabilities, the research team was able to decipher which emissions in the spectral data were from the black hole and which were from its host galaxy. They also estimated the rate at which the black hole was ingesting gas and determined the star-formation rate of its galaxy.
The images obtained by JWST revealed that CEERS 1019 appears as three bright clumps rather than a single circular disk, indicating a possible galaxy merger and increased star formation. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor of astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, described the images as unprecedented, stating, “We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances.”
These groundbreaking discoveries mark only the beginning of what the CEERS Survey promises to reveal. Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, along with the team, identified another pair of small black holes in the data. These black holes, in galaxies CEERS 2782 and CEERS 746, are also “lightweight” compared to previously known supermassive black holes. They are only about 10 million times the mass of the sun. Before JWST’s observations, these black holes were too faint to be detected.
The sensitivity of JWST’s spectral analysis has allowed researchers to measure the precise distances and ages of galaxies in the early universe. Pablo Arrabal Haro of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin, identified 11 galaxies that existed between 470 million and 675 million years after the Big Bang. The large number of detected galaxies challenges previous theories about JWST detecting fewer galaxies at these distances.
Finkelstein is thrilled about the potential of JWST’s data and its impact on our understanding of the early universe. He stated, “Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical. 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.”
Future research using JWST’s data may further elucidate the formation of early black holes and revise current models of black hole growth and evolution. The James Webb Space Telescope, an international program led by NASA with partners, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency, is poised to usher in a new era of astronomical research and our understanding of the cosmos.