Latest news with #StevenFinkelstein
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Record breaking black hole discovered by UT Austin astronomers
AUSTIN (KXAN) — The most distant black hole ever confirmed has now been discovered. A team led by astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin announced the discovery of the black hole in the CAPERS-LRD-z9 galaxy earlier this month. The black hole is 300 million times more massive than our sun. In fact, it has more mass than half of the stars in its own galaxy combined. Discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, the black hole formed 500 million years after the Big Bang. This makes it 13.3 billion years old. The team, led by UT Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center, published its work on Aug. 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. To discover black holes, astronomers look for a peculiar light signature that signals fast moving gas. Gas that moves towards us is compressed into blue wavelengths, while gas moving away from us appears red through spectroscopy. In a press release from UT Austin, the paper's lead author, Anthony Taylor, said, 'There aren't many other things that create this signature (besides a black hole).' The galaxy where the black hole was discovered is called a 'Little Red Dot' galaxy. These galaxies formed in the first 1.5 billion years of the universe. The first discovery of these galaxies was made by the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021. The discovery of this black hole gives us a better understanding of the early universe. In that same press release, Steven Finkelstein, a co-author of the paper, said, 'This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible.' The team hopes the next steps for its research are to use James Webb to get more data on the CAPERS-LRD-z9 galaxy. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Gizmodo
07-08-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Astronomers Discover the Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed
An international team of astronomers has identified the earliest black hole ever confirmed, an ancient behemoth that existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery could offer new clues to a mysterious class of ancient galaxies that confounded prevailing theories of cosmology. In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers describe CAPERS-LRD-z9—a distant, gas-enshrouded galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. It dates back some 13.3 billion years, a point when the universe was just 3% of its current age. Spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, CAPERS-LRD-z9 is one of many 'little red dot' galaxies—these strange bodies began popping up in Webb imagery within the first year of the telescope's mission. '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,' Steven Finkelstein, co-author of the new study and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a press release. 'Now, we're in the process of figuring out what they're like and how they came to be.' Little red dot galaxies are named for their scarlet pinprick appearance in Webb's images, and no telescope prior to Webb has had the sensitivity or resolution to detect such distant objects—hence why no one had seen them before. Their discovery threw consensus ideas about our universe into question: If these objects were stars, their strong light emissions would imply that some galaxies had grown so big and so fast that prevailing theory couldn't account for them, according to NASA. Finkelstein and his colleagues compiled one of the largest samples of litte red dot galaxies to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. That study, published in January, found a significant number of these objects likely contained growing supermassive black holes. The finding offered an alternative explanation for how much light the galaxies emit, but they needed more evidence to support their theory. So Finkelstein and a team led by Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center who also worked on the research published in January, sifted through spectroscopy data from Webb's CAPERS (CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey) program. Spectroscopy measures different wavelengths of light to reveal details about an object's characteristics. When black holes interact with surrounding gas clouds, it produces a distinct spectroscopic signature: As gas rapidly swirls around and falls into a black hole, light from gas that is moving away from us stretches into redder wavelengths, while light from gas that is moving toward us compresses into bluer wavelengths. 'There aren't many other things that create this signature,' Taylor said, and CAPERS-LRD-z9 has it. The discovery marks the first time astronomers have found this spectroscopic signature associated with a little red dot galaxy, according to the team, indicating that supermassive black holes are the likely source of their unexplained brightness. The work could also help explain what makes these galaxies so red: If light is passing through a thick cloud of gas around a supermassive blackhole, it would stretch into redder wavelengths. 'We've seen these clouds in other galaxies,' Taylor said. 'When we compared this object to those other sources, it was a dead ringer.' The discovery could also offer fresh insights into black hole evolution. Taylor and his colleagues estimate that the black hole at the center of this galaxy is enormous—up to 300 million times more massive than the Sun. Finding a black hole of this size that existed so early on in the universe 'adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,' Finkelstein said. 'Or they started out far more massive than our models predict.'
