Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found the most distant supermassive black hole so far existing just 570 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe.
The new data could change how astronomers think about how black holes grew and evolved in the first several hundred million years of the universe’s history.
The incredible new data also produced evidence for:
- two more previously unknown black holes.
- eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was just 470 to 675 million years old.
Record Breaking
However, the black hole—called CEERS 1019—may only hold this record for a few weeks.
That’s because the incredibly precise data being sent back from Webb about the faint early universe continues to bring surprises at a pace that’s astounding astronomers.
Evidence for the farthest black hole the other discoveries—published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters—comes from Webb’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. Its aim is to study galaxies in the “epoch of reionization,” a cosmic time when light from the first stars was warming-up space.
CEERS uses Webb to combine near- and mid-infrared imagery of the early universe with different wavelengths of light.
Less Massive
What’s so alarming for astronomers about CEERS 1019 is that it’s far less massive than other black holes previously found in the early universe. It weighs just nine million times the mass of our sun—only about twice that of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
That might sound like a lot, but other, far brighter supermassive black holes found in the early universe have so far been about a billion the mass of the sun.
Webb is the first telescope that can see black holes anything like this distant and faint—and it’s quickly providing observations to back-up theoretical physics.
“Researchers have long known that there must be lower mass black holes in the early universe [but] Webb is the first observatory that can capture them so clearly,” said Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, a CEERS Survey team member. “Now we think that lower mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered.”
Incredible Galaxies
The discovery of 11 relatively bright galaxies, some existing even closer to the Big Bang—just 470 to 675 million years after—is equally as surprising, say the researchers involved. It had been thought that Webb would see few galaxies like this so close to the beginning of the universe. “I am overwhelmed by the amount of highly detailed spectra of remote galaxies Webb returned,” said Pablo Arrabal Haro of NSF’s NOIRLab, a CEERS Survey team member. “These data are absolutely incredible.”
It’s thought that Webb’s data on these early galaxies may change astronomers’ understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution.
CEERS is only just getting going.
“Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical,” said Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin, who leads the CEERS Survey. “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.”
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.