Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole we have ever seen. This record-breaking blackhole was found using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory , and James Webb Space Telescope . The researchers say the black hole existed as long ago as 470 million years after the Big Bang.
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Akos Bogdan from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) spearheaded the discovery and was the lead author on a new paper on the discovery that has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy and outlines how the astronomers combined data from the two telescopes to make the discovery.
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” Bogdan says. Bogdan says the team took advantage of the gravitational lenses, which magnify objects and bend light around galaxies.
This discovery is especially important for understanding how supermassive black holes grow, as well as how they can reach the masses that they do, especially so soon after the Big Bang. As far as we know, there are some kind of limits on how fast black holes can grow once they form. Andy Goulding explains that those who are born with a massive mass have an advantage.
The researchers believe the record-breaking black hole may have formed out of the collapse of a huge cloud of gas, thus allowing it to reach the size and mass that it showcases in the X-ray images they captured. Researchers are fascinated by the black hole’s origins, as it existed so many years ago.
A preprint of the paper is already available on arXiv, and the full paper will be available in the upcoming issue of Nature Astronomy.
The post Astronomers discover record-breaking black hole from early universe appeared first on BGR.
