The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant supermassive black hole known to date, which appears to be active.
The galaxy housing the black hole, named CEERS 1019, has survived for over 570 million years after the Big Bang, and the black hole itself is less massive than any other previously discovered in the early universe.
In addition, the James Webb telescope has identified 11 galaxies that existed when the universe was only 470 to 675 million years old, according to NASA.
The black hole within CEERS 1019 shares similarities with the one located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is 4.6 million times more massive than the Sun, NASA stated. However, the newly discovered black hole is not as bright as the massive behemoths detected before.
Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville explained, “Researchers have long known that there must be lower-mass black holes in the early universe. Webb is the first observatory that can capture them so clearly.”
NASA mentioned that the black hole, although smaller, existed so long ago that astronomers are struggling to explain how it formed after the universe’s inception.
Compared to other telescopes, the James Webb telescope provides scientists with more precise information to find and validate theories. According to NASA, researchers can observe the amount of gas being consumed by the black hole and determine the star-formation rate of its galaxy.
Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, stated, “Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical. 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.”
Visually, CEERS 1019 appears as three bright clumps rather than a single circular disk. Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, a member of the CEERS team, commented, “We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances.”
The James Webb telescope is expected to provide a wealth of data to scientists, enabling them to explore galaxies and black holes in greater detail.
Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Texas stated, “This set, along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history.”
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