The James Webb Space Telescope has made a historic discovery, spotting the oldest black hole ever seen in the universe. This ancient monster has the mass of 1.6 million suns and is lurking 13 billion years in the past. The telescope, equipped with powerful cameras that allow it to look back in time to the universe’s beginnings, found the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy GN-z11 just 440 million years after the universe began.
This finding has shed light on the cosmic dawn, a period about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe began glowing for a billion years. The discovery has raised questions about how these early black holes grew so rapidly in scale and what may have caused their peculiar birth and formation.
It is believed that closer to the present day, black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and then grow by consuming gas, dust, stars, and other black holes. As they feast, the friction causes the material to heat up and emit light that can be detected by telescopes, turning them into active galactic nuclei (AGN). The most extreme AGN are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the sun.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, but the scientists believe that the most popular explanations for how these early black holes grew so fast are that they formed from the sudden collapse of giant gas clouds or that they came from many mergers between clumps of stars and black holes. Another theory that has not been ruled out is that some of these black holes could have been seeded by hypothesized “primordial” black holes, thought to be created moments after the universe began.
The discovery of the oldest black hole ever seen in the universe is a significant milestone in our understanding of the early universe. The James Webb Space Telescope continues to push the boundaries of our knowledge, offering unprecedented insights into the cosmos.