Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery, spotting the oldest and most distant black hole ever found. The black hole was detected using data captured via energetic X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope. The discovery has helped astronomers observe a growing black hole within the early universe, just 470 million years after the big bang.
Published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the study describes how the telescopes were used to find the signature of a supermassive black hole in the UHZ1 galaxy, located 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. Lead study author Akos Bogdan, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, highlighted the crucial role of the Webb telescope in finding the remarkably distant galaxy and the Chandra telescope in detecting its supermassive black hole.
The telescope’s observations were enhanced by the gravitational lensing effect, caused by the Abell cluster of galaxies, which amplified the light of the UHZ1 galaxy and the X-rays released by the black hole by a factor of four. This allowed the team of researchers to detect superheated gas releasing X-rays within the UHZ1 galaxy, a telltale sign of a supermassive black hole growing in size.
The discovery is expected to provide crucial insights into how supermassive black holes appeared and attained their massive masses shortly after the beginning of the universe. The researchers aim to understand whether the giant celestial objects formed when massive clouds of gas collapsed or if they resulted from the explosions of the very first massive stars. Priyamvada Natarajan, a coauthor on both studies and a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, highlighted the significance of this discovery as the first detection of an “Outsize Black Hole,” providing further evidence that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas.
The findings suggest that this unusual black hole could be a pivotal stage in understanding the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in the early universe. The researchers’ work has shed light on a previously unseen aspect of the cosmos, offering a glimpse into the distant past and unlocking new mysteries of the universe’s origins.