Scientists discovered a distant black hole 300 million times the size of the sun. It's a portal back in time.
The black hole lies at the center of a galaxy known as CAPERS-LRD-z9. Both cosmic objects are thought to have formed around 13.3 billion years ago, or just 500 million years after the big bang that created the universe. (The big bang theory suggests the universe started as an ultradense, extremely hot point that rapidly expanded out in all directions in a chaotic event some 13.8 billion years ago.)
The black hole discovery, described in a study published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could shed light on the universe's earliest days and provide insight into how black holes and galaxies evolved.
Light takes time to travel across space, which means observing distant objects in the cosmos is a bit like accessing a portal back in time, said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study's international team of scientists.
'When we look at objects that are very, very far away, it has taken that light billions upon billions of years to reach us,' he said. 'So in reality, we're seeing these objects as they were in the early universe.'
As far as black holes go, this one is huge, according to the researchers. It's estimated to be up to 300 million times the size of the sun, with a mass equivalent to that of half the stars in its galaxy.
It's also roughly 10 times more massive than the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Taylor said.
Taylor and his colleagues found the black hole in observations of the outermost reaches of the universe from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The researchers used a technique known as spectroscopy, which splits light into different wavelengths and colors, similar to how a prism separates sunlight into the colors of the rainbow.
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