Webb Telescope Discovers Oldest Black Hole – Breaking Universe Records

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected the oldest confirmed supermassive black hole, found in a rare "Little Red Spot" galaxy and formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

A global team of astronomers has confirmed the discovery of the most distant black hole ever observed. The black hole is located in a galaxy called CAPERS-LRD-z9, which existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

In other words, the light we see from it travels 13.3 billion years, revealing the universe when it was only 3% of its current age. This unusual finding gives scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study how cosmic structures formed and evolved in one of the earliest and least understood stages of the universe.

"When you look for black holes, this is as far back as you can practically go. We're really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect," said Anthony Taylor, a senior member of the team that made the discovery.

"Astronomers have found some more distant candidates," added Steven Finkelstein, one of the authors of the paper, "but they have not yet found the unique spectroscopic signature associated with a black hole."

Discovering the signature of a black hole

Using spectroscopy, astronomers separate light into its many wavelengths to study the properties of an object. To identify black holes, they look for evidence of fast-moving gas. As it orbits a black hole and falls into it, light from gas moving away from us is stretched to much redder wavelengths, and light from gas moving toward us is compressed to much bluer wavelengths. “There aren’t many other things that create this signature,” Taylor explained. “And this galaxy has it!”

The team used data from the James Webb Space Telescope's CAPERS program for its search. Webb, which launches in 2021, provides the farthest-reaching views into space, and CAPERS provides observations of the farthest edge.

"The first goal of CAPERS is to verify and study the most distant galaxies," said Mark Dickenson, co-author of the paper and leader of the CAPERS team. "Webb's spectroscopy is key to verifying their distances and understanding their physical properties."

CAPERS-LRD-z9, which initially appeared as an interesting speck in the program's images, turned out to be part of a new class of galaxies called "little red dots." Found only in the first 1.5 billion years of the galaxy's life, these galaxies are very compact, red, and unexpectedly bright.

"The discovery of the Little Red Dots was a big surprise from early Webb data, because they didn't look like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope," Finkelstein explained. "Now we're in the process of understanding what they are and how they formed."

CAPERS-LRD-z9 might help astronomers with exactly this task.

Brightness, color and black holes

For example, this galaxy adds to the growing evidence that supermassive black holes are the source of the unexpected brightness of the Little Red Spots. Normally, this brightness would indicate an abundance of stars in a galaxy. But the Little Red Spots exist at a time when such a large mass of stars is improbable.

On the other hand, black holes also shine brightly. This is because they compress and heat the material they consume, creating a lot of light and energy. The astronomers confirmed the existence of a black hole in CAPERS-LRD-z9, thereby finding a striking example of this connection in the Little Red Spots.

The new galaxy may help explain what causes the distinctive red color of the little red dots. The cause could be a thick cloud of gas surrounding the black hole, which shifts its light to redder wavelengths as it passes through it. "We've seen these clouds in other galaxies," Taylor explained. "When you compare this object to these other sources, they're like two drops of water."

This galaxy is also notable for the sheer size of its black hole. Its mass, estimated to be up to 300 million times that of the Sun, is equivalent to half the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. Even among supermassive black holes, this is exceptionally large.

Finding such a massive black hole in the early universe is an important opportunity to study how these objects evolved. In the later universe, a black hole would have had multiple opportunities to grow in size over its lifetime, but not in the first few hundred million years. "This adds to the growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible," Finkelstein said. "Or they started out much more massive than our models predict."

for the scientific article

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• How a black hole grows
• Close range with the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
• The quantum mechanics of black holes
• The Webb Space Telescope Peeps Into Chaos - Captures Stellar Gymnastics in the Wheel Galaxy
• The Webb Space Telescope Discovered Galaxies 33 Billion Light Years Away That Challenge Astronomical Theories