The newly-discovered black hole resides in the hyperluminous galaxy GN-z11 at a redshift of 11 and could have originated from a stellar mass seed at redshifts 12 to 15.
GN-z11 is a young but moderately massive galaxy located in the constellation of Ursa Major.
First discovered in 2016, this galaxy is estimated to date from when the Universe was only 420 million years old, or 3% of its current age.
GN-z11 is approximately 25 times smaller than our Milky Way and has just 1% of our Galaxy’s mass in stars.
Surprisingly, according to the new study, the galaxy hosts a black hole of about 1.6 million solar masses.
“Multiple theories have been proposed to describe the formation of black hole seeds in the early Universe and to explain the emergence of very massive black holes observed to be already in place at redshifts z=6-7.5,” said University of Cambridge’s Professor Roberto Maiolino and colleagues.
“Black holes resulting from the direct collapse of primordial clouds (possibly preceded by the formation of a supermassive star) into seeds with masses in the range of 10,000 to one million solar masses — the so-called direct collapse black holes — is one of the models most frequently invoked.”
“However, other models also consider rapid merging of stars and black holes in dense, nuclear star clusters, as well as accretion onto Population III black hole seeds or even normal stellar remnants.”
“Super-Eddington accretion has also been considered a possibility,” they added.
“Yet, none of these scenarios have been properly tested so far, as they required the observation of black holes at higher redshift (z > 10) and at lower masses (less than 10 million solar masses), which has been unfeasible until the advent of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.”
In their study, Professor Maiolino and co-authors performed an extensive analysis of the spectrum of GN-z11.
“Initially detected with Hubble, this is the brightest galaxy at redshifts over…
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