Astronomers have discovered the universe’s oldest black hole with the JWST, a discovery that challenges current theories of black hole growth and suggest that the black hole has the potential to impact the development of its host galaxy, GNz11.
The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the black hole, which dates from 400 million years after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago. The results are reported by lead author Professor Roberto Maiolino in the journal Nature 627 with the title A small and vigorous black hole in the early Universe.
Challenging Existing Theories
That this surprisingly massive black hole, a few million times the mass of our sun, even exists so early in the universe challenges our assumptions about how black holes form and grow. Astronomers believe that the supermassive black holes found at the center of galaxies like the Milky Way grew to their current size over billions
of years. But the size of this newly-discovered black hole suggests that they might form in other ways: they might be ‘born big’ or they can eat matter at a rate that’s five times higher than previously had been thought possible.
Formation of Supermassive Black Holes
According to standard models, supermassive black holes form from the remnants of dead stars, which collapse and may form a black hole about a hundred times the mass of the sun. If it grew in an expected way, this newly-detected black hole would take about a billion years to grow to its observed size. However, the universe was not yet a billion years old when this black hole was detected.
It’s very early in the universe to see a black hole this massive, so we’ve got to consider other ways they might form, said Maiolino. Very early galaxies were extremely gasrich, so they would have been like a buffet for black holes.
Like all black holes, this young black hole is devouring material from its host galaxy to fuel its growth. Yet, this ancient black hole is found to gobble matter much more vigorously than its siblings at later epochs.
