Observations of quasars reveal that many supermassive black holes were in place less than 700 million years after the Big Bang. However, the origin of the first black holes remains a mystery. Seeds of the first black holes are postulated to be either light (that is, 10-100 solar masses), remnants of the first stars, or heavy (up to 100,000 solar masses), originating from the direct collapse of gas clouds. Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have now detected an X-ray-luminous black hole in a gravitationally lensed galaxy identified by the NASA/ESACSA James Webb Space Telescope behind the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. Named UHZ-1, the black hole has a mass between 10 million and 100 million solar masses, and is 13.2 billion light-years away, which means the telescopes are peering back in time to when the Universe was only about 450 million years old. The discovery, reported in two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy and the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is consistent with a picture wherein black holes originated from heavy seeds.
“This is one of the most dramatic discoveries to come out of Webb and the discovery of the most distant growing supermassive black hole known. Indeed, it completely smashes the old record,” said Princeton University’s Professor Michael Strauss.
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” added Dr. Akos Bogdan, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics.
“We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected. This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing.”
The astronomers found the early black hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which is located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.
The Webb data revealed UHZ1 is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the Universe was…
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