FORBES
Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found the most distant supermassive black hole so far, existing just 570 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe.
The new data could change how astronomers think about how black holes grew and evolved in the first several hundred million years of the universe’s history.
The incredible new data also produced evidence for:
- two more previously unknown black holes.
- eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was just 470 to 675 million years old.
Record Breaking
However, the black hole—called CEERS 1019—may only hold this record for a few weeks.
That’s because the incredibly precise data being sent back from Webb about the faint early universe continues to bring surprises at a pace that’s astounding astronomers.
Evidence for the farthest black hole the other discoveries—published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters—comes from Webb’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. Its aim is to study galaxies in the “epoch of reionization,” a cosmic time when light from the first stars was warming-up space.
CEERS uses Webb to combine near- and mid-infrared imagery of the early universe with different wavelengths of light.
This graphic shows detections of the most distant[+]
Less Massive
What’s so alarming for astronomers about CEERS 1019 is that it’s far less massive than other black holes previously found in the early universe. It weighs just nine million times the mass of our sun—only about twice that of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
