A group of scientists have discovered the oldest black hole to date. It is believed to have been created approximately 470 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery was made possible thanks to combined technology James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, both are operated by NASA.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Therefore, this black hole is 13.2 billion years old. In other words, It appeared when the age of the Universe was only 3% of its current age.
The black hole was captured in an early stage of growth that has never been seen before, and its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy. Their discovery may help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes formed.
The oldest black hole at the moment is located in a galaxy called UHZ1, which is in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. And there is another fact that surprised the researchers: it is huge.
The team found strong evidence that the black hole was born massive. It is 10 times larger than the black hole in our Milky Way. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 100 million suns, depending on the brightness and energy captured by the X-rays.
The oldest black hole is
The mass range of this black hole He looks like the star of all the stars in the galaxy where he lives.. This is in stark contrast to the black holes at the centers of neighboring galaxies, which typically contain only about a tenth the mass of the stars in their host galaxy.
“We needed Webb to find this amazingly distant galaxy, and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the study published this Monday in the journal. Nature Astronomy. “We also took advantage of the cosmic magnifying glass, which increased the amount of light we detected,” Bogdan added. This magnification effect is known as gravitational lensing.
The existence of such a massive black hole was previously suggested by Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in her theoretical predictions published in 2017. “We believe this is the first detection of a large black hole. and this is the best evidence that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” Natarajan said.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is operated by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The James Webb Space Telescope, also owned by the American agency, is the world’s main space science observatory. He started working more than a year ago. In this short time, great mysteries related to the origin of our Universe have already begun to be solved.
Source: Hiper Textual
