2024-01-18 08:02:02
An international team led by the University of Cambridge has discovered the oldest black hole ever observed. Among all, they have discovered that this black hole is “devouring” its host galaxy to death.
In their work, the team used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the black hole. In this way, they have been able to analyze that it dates back to 400 million years after the Big Bang, more than 13,000 million years ago. Lead author Roberto Maiolino calls the results “a big step forward.” They have been published in the magazine ‘Nature’.
The fact that this surprisingly massive black hole (a few million times the mass of our Sun) comes into existence so early in the universe challenges assumptions about how black holes form and grow.
Astronomers think that supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way grew to their current size over billions of years. Now, the size of this newly discovered black hole suggests that they could form in other ways: they could be “born big” or they could eat matter at a rate five times greater than what was considered possible.
Standard models indicate that supermassive black holes are formed from the remains of dead stars, which collapse and have the capacity to form a black hole about one hundred times the mass of the Sun. If it grew in the way expected, this hole newly detected black would take about a billion years to grow to the observed size. However, the universe was not yet a billion years old when this black hole was detected.
Like all black holes, this young black hole devours material from its host galaxy to contribute to its growth. However, it has been discovered that the ancient black hole devours matter more forcefully than its brothers from later times.
The host galaxy, named ‘GN-z11’, is a compact galaxy, about a hundred times smaller than the Milky Way, although the black hole is likely to hinder its development. When black holes consume too much gas, what they do is push it out as an ultra-fast wind that could stop the star formation process, slowly killing the galaxy and the black hole itself, since it would also cut off the hole’s “food” source. black.
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