2024-01-18 07:37:34
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest black hole known to date.
This was created so soon following the Big Bang that the discovery might lead to new theories regarding the formation of black holes, astronomers said, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Black holes have such strong gravity that even light cannot escape them. Like all black holes, the newly discovered black hole is invisible and was only discovered through the powerful explosions of light that occur when matter is devoured, the study continued.
It was this light that enabled the Hubble Space Telescope to discover its host galaxy GN-z11 in 2016 – the oldest and most distant galaxy at the time. However, Hubble did not discover the black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Normally, black holes in galaxies take hundreds of millions – if not billions – of years to form. Stephane Charlot, co-author of the study and astrophysicist in Paris, now suspects that black holes might have formed in a different way in the early days of the universe than later.
For example, they might have been formed by the explosion of particularly massive stars that only existed in the early universe, said Charlot. Alternatively, they might have been formed by the “direct collapse of a dense gas cloud without going through the star formation phase,” he added. The hole might then have swallowed up the abundant gas around it, causing it to grow rapidly.
Scholtz emphasized that everything known so far regarding the GN-z11 galaxy’s black hole “does not rule out any of these scenarios.” The scientist hopes that the Webb and other telescopes, such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid Telescope, will discover even more black holes from the early days of the universe.
The James Webb Telescope, which was also built with German participation, was launched into space in December 2021 following decades of preparation. It is now more than one and a half million kilometers from Earth.
It explores the early days of the cosmos, just a few hundred million years following the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago. Astronomers hope to draw conclusions regarding the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
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