Astronomers have detected the oldest black hole ever observed, dating back more than 13 billion years to the dawn of the universe.
According to The Guardian, the observations, by the James Webb space telescope (JWST), reveal it to be at the heart of a galaxy known as “GN-z11”, at around a million times the mass of the sun.
Prof. Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, who led the observations, said: “The surprise is in it being so very massive. That was the most unexpected thing.”
Astronomers believe the earliest black holes could help unlock a puzzle of how their gargantuan counterparts at the center of galaxies, such as the Milky Way, grew to many times the mass of the sun.
Until recently, they were assumed to have simply snowballed over nearly 14 billion years, steadily growing through mergers and by gobbling up stars and other objects.
The latest observations push the origins of this mystery back to black holes’ infancy and suggest that they were either born big or ballooned extremely rapidly early on.
“Understanding where the black holes came from in the first place has always been a puzzle, but now that puzzle seems to be deepening. These results suggest that some black holes instead grew at a tremendous rate in the young universe, far faster than we expected,” said Prof. Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London, who was not involved in the research.
The findings are the latest in a series of stunning discoveries by Nasa’s space observatory just two years after its launch.
JWST is about 100 times more sensitive than previous telescopes, such as Hubble, at detecting the most distant objects.
