The James Webb space telescope has made a groundbreaking discovery, revealing the existence of the oldest black hole ever detected. This celestial behemoth was thriving a mere 430 million years after the birth of the universe, during a period known as the cosmic dawn. The findings, published in the journal Nature, have left astronomers astounded and have the potential to reshape our understanding of how black holes form.
According to study co-author and Cambridge University astronomer Jan Scholtz, this black hole is not only the oldest but also the most massive ever observed, with a mass 1.6 million times greater than our Sun. Its rapid growth in such a short span challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the formation of black holes and provides valuable insights for the next generation of theoretical models.
Black holes, by nature, are invisible and can only be detected by the immense bursts of light they emit when consuming nearby matter. It was through these bursts of light that the Hubble space telescope, in 2016, was able to identify the host galaxy GN-z11, located in the Ursa Major constellation. At the time, GN-z11 was considered the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed. However, the black hole at its center went unnoticed by Hubble.
In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope surpassed Hubble as the most powerful space telescope, ushering in a wave of new discoveries that have scientists scrambling to keep up. Not only did it detect the black hole residing in GN-z11, but it also revealed the existence of galaxies even further back in time and space, which are larger than previously believed possible.
The energetic consumption of GN-z11 by the black hole during the cosmic dawn, a period immediately following the “dark ages” of the universe, when stars and galaxies were first born, is a perplexing phenomenon. Supermassive black holes typically take hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years to form at the center of galaxies. So how did this particular black hole grow at such an astonishing rate?
Stephane Charlot, an astrophysicist at France’s Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and co-author of the study, proposes that black holes in the early universe may have formed differently from those closer to us. One theory suggests that they were born massive due to the explosion of exceptionally large stars that only existed in the early universe. Another possibility is that they were created through the direct collapse of dense gas clouds, bypassing the star formation phase entirely.
Once formed, the black hole would have had an abundant supply of nearby gas to consume, fueling its exponential growth. Scholtz stresses that the discovery of GN-z11’s black hole does not rule out any of these scenarios and may just be the beginning of unraveling the mysteries of black hole formation.
Looking ahead, Scholtz anticipates that the James Webb Space Telescope, along with upcoming telescopes like the European Space Agency’s Euclid, will continue to uncover more of these early universe black holes. These discoveries have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and shed light on the origins of these enigmatic celestial objects.
Source: The Manila Times
