- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date.
- The black hole has the mass of 9 million suns. It existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope has made another unprecedented discovery in the early universe: a supermassive black hole that appeared too soon after the Big Bang for scientists to explain.
NASA's Webb observatory is the most powerful ever launched into space. It can see farther into the cosmos and the distant past than any prior telescope.
That's how it spotted a supermassive black hole just over 570 million years after the Big Bang in a galaxy called CEERS 1019, researchers announced on Thursday.
Black holes have so much condensed matter in such a small space that light can't escape their gravity, making them invisible. However, it's possible to see the gas, stars, and other cosmic matter surrounding them, which is how Webb detected this one.
"Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical," astronomer Steven Finkelstein, one of the leads of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. "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."
Scientists still don't know how supermassive black holes formed in such a short period of time following the birth of the universe. But with Webb, they can measure these cosmic monsters' size and distance from Earth to better understand them, and this latest discovery breaks several records.
Webb shows details of the supermassive black hole's size and structure
Not only is this mysterious beast the earliest supermassive black hole ever observed, it's also the most distant active supermassive black hole on record.
The distant black hole "is ravenous, consuming gas, dust, and stars at the highest theoretically possible rate for its size," the research team notes.
Its size is another one of its surprising features. It's smaller than other black holes discovered in the universe's early phases.
The black hole is 9 million solar masses, while most others from the early universe are 1 billion solar masses or a billion times greater than the mass of the sun.
For comparison, a 9 million solar mass black hole is closer to the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
How did a black hole form so soon after the Big Bang?
The team's work is part of the James Webb Space Telescope's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, which observed two more small supermassive black holes in galaxies CEERS 2782 and CEERS 746.
"Now we think that lower-mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered," said Dale Kocevski of Colby College, who led one of the studies.
In fact, researchers note that CEERS 1019 may only hold the record for the most-distant supermassive black hole for a few weeks because astronomers are reviewing other contenders that Webb identified.
Primordial black holes formed soon after the Big Bang, but the origin of the supermassive black hole in galaxy CEERS 1019 is mysterious. Future discoveries from the CEERS survey could provide clues to these black holes' formation.
Another recent breakthrough lays out a new path for understanding how supermassive black holes and large galaxies formed so quickly after the Big Bang.
Scientists recently found compelling evidence for a sea of ripples in space-time permeating the universe. These "gravitational waves" are likely the reverberations of collisions between supermassive black holes, going back toward the beginning of the universe.
Someday astrophysicists may be able to follow those waves back to the early, merging black holes that made them. By studying such mergers, they can learn how black holes got to be so big so early, and how the first galaxies grew up so quickly too.