a day ago
Oldest black hole ever seen is 300 million times bigger than our sun
Astronomers have identified the most distant—and by extension earliest—black hole ever seen. Located in the galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9, the supermassive black hole likely formed 13.3 billion years ago, barely 500 million years after the big bang. But recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mean we could find many similar black holes lurking inside so-called Little Red Dots, or LRDs.
Experts started spotting the Little Red Dots about three years ago. In December 2022, data collected by the JWST indicated these numerous, never-before-seen pinpricks of light from extremely distant, ancient formations created at the dawn of the universe. Additional analysis showed that around 70 percent of these LRDs displayed evidence of gas swirling around 2 million miles per hour—solid indicators of accretion disks surrounding supermassive black holes. In many cases, similar accreting black holes are telltale signs of active galactic nuclei, but astronomers needed to examine the evidence more carefully.
After years of follow-up study, an international research team led by the University of Texas at Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center say they can now confirm CAPERS-LRD-z9 contains the oldest supermassive black hole ever detected.
'When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go. We're really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,' Cosmic Frontier Center researcher and study lead author Anthony Taylor said in a statement.
The evidence published on August 6 in the Astrophysical Journal came from JWST's CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey (CAPERS) project. Of all its technological arrays, CAPERS allows the telescope to observe the outermost edges of space currently possible. To determine CAPERS-LRD-z9's true identity, experts conducted a spectroscopic analysis of its light emissions in a bid to find fast-moving gas. As it falls into a black hole, gas moving away from Earth's perspective is stretched into redder wavelengths, while the gas moving towards the planet compresses into blue waves.
'There aren't many other things that create this signature. And this galaxy has it,' said Taylor. 'We've seen these clouds in other galaxies. When we compared this object to those other sources, it was a dead ringer.'
Further examinations revealed that while a Little Red Dot may appear 'little' at this distance, the name is a bit misleading. The black hole at the center of CAPERS-LRD-z9 is believed to be as much as 300 million times larger than the sun, with a mass equivalent to half of its galaxy's stars. That makes it particularly supermassive even when compared to other supermassive black holes.
The implications of its size are particularly striking to astronomers. While newer black holes have plenty of material to devour, that theoretically wouldn't be the case for one born within the universe's first 500 million years.
'This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible. Or they started out far more massive than our models predict,' said Steven Finkelstein, Cosmic Frontier Center director and study co-author.
Moving forward, the team hopes to compile even higher resolution observations from JWST.
'The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early JWST data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope,' Finkelstein explained. 'Now, we're in the process of figuring out what they're like and how they came to be.'
Solve the daily Crossword
