Astrophysicists from various countries managed to observe one of the black holes largest and most remote, located approximately 13,000 million light years from Earth, using the James Webb Space Telescope. This remarkable discovery occurs at a point in the Universe that dates back about 800 million years after its formation.
The study, which had notable participation by members of the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), associated with the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) of Spain, was published in the journal “Nature Astronomy“.
One of the most shocking revelations of the study, as reported by the CAB, is that this ancient and massive black hole It is nourished in a similar way to the youngest and closest known black holes. This finding contradicts theories that postulated unconventional mechanisms to explain how these black holes acquired their mass in the initial phases of the Universe, according to recent observations of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The “cosmic dawn”
Because the first 1,000 million years of cosmic history – the so-called “cosmic dawn” – pose a challenge to science, to reveal how the first black holes so massive and in such an accelerated manner, since those known in the centers of galaxies have surprisingly large masses.
Stars and galaxies have changed enormously since, and over the last 13.8 billion years, the lifetime of the Universe, galaxies have grown and gained more mass, either because they have consumed the surrounding gas or, occasionally, because they have merged with each other.
That is why astronomers had been surprised when, during the last twenty years, observations of quasars (very luminous and distant galaxies in the Solar System) had revealed some black holes very young and yet they had reached enormous masses, up to 10,000 million solar masses.
The CAB explained that light takes time to travel from a distant object, so “looking” at distant objects means looking into the distant past and seeing the most distant known quasars as they were during the “cosmic dawn,” which is located about a billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies formed.
There are many explanations that researchers have given so far to try to explain how the first black holes so massive so quickly, although no scientific reasoning is completely accepted, but the instruments that the James Webb incorporates, including the MIRI medium infrared instrument, have made it possible to take “a gigantic leap” in these studies.
