James Webb Space Telescope discovers oldest black hole in the universe -- a cosmic monster 10 million

James Webb Space Telescope discovers oldest black hole in the universe — a cosmic monster 10 million times heavier than the sun

By Ben Turner published 8 days ago

The James Webb Space Telescope detected what may be the oldest known black hole in the universe by deconstructing faint glimmers of light from close to the dawn of time.


The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known black hole in the universe, and astronomers think even earlier ones could have swarmed the young cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose powerful cameras allow it to peer back in time to the earliest stages of the universe, discovered the supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 10 million times that of the sun, at the center of a baby galaxy 570 million years after the universe began.

The cosmic monster could be just one of countless black holes that gorged themselves to ever-larger sizes during the cosmic dawn — the period starting about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe glowed for a billion years. Astronomers aren't sure why there were so many of these black holes or how they got so big. The researchers who found the latest black hole published their findings March 15 on the preprint server arXiv, but the research has not been peer-reviewed yet.

"This is the first one that we're finding at this redshift [point in time after the Big Bang], but there should be many of them," lead study author Rebecca Larson, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "We do expect that this black hole didn't just form [recently], so there should be more that are younger and existed earlier on in the universe. We're just starting to be able to study this time in cosmic history this way with the JWST, and I'm excited for us to find more of them."

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https://www.livescience.com/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-oldest-black-hole-in-the-universe-a-cosmic-monster-ten-million-times-heavier-than-the-sun