NASA discovers the most distant black hole ever seen

Astronomers discovered farthest supermassive black hole ever seen in x-raysUsing NASA telescopes. Its light comes from a time when the Universe was only 470 million years old. This star, located in UHZ1, is in a never-before-observed early growth phase where its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy.

This discovery May explain how some of the universe’s first supermassive black holes formed. To discover this black hole, researchers leveraged the combined capabilities of the Chandra x-ray observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope.

“We needed Webb to find the galaxy and Chandra to find the supermassive black hole,” said astrophysicist Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Bogdan and his team found the black hole in a galaxy called UHZ1 in the direction of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster, located 3.5 million light-years from Earth.

Help of the gravitational lens

The progress in detecting UHZ1 comes from the ingenious use of gravitational lensing, a feature of relativity.

When there’s a lot of gravity, like a cluster of galaxies twisting around these lenses, Any light that passes through this curved space-time from distant regions of the universe can be amplified, copied and distorted..

UHZ1 experienced a fourfold increase in its light thanks to the gravitational pull of the cluster. This development allowed JWST to discern the galaxy’s light, while the Chandra x-ray observatory detected X-rays emitted by gas orbiting the supermassive black hole at its centre.

Birth of a giant

Scientists find strong evidence that newly discovered black hole was born supermassive. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 100 million suns, depending on the brightness and energy of the X-rays.

Traditionally, the ratio between the mass of a black hole and the mass of its host galaxy is around half a percent. The findings show that UHZ1 and its black hole are young, meaning the black hole seed formed from the collapse of a large cloud of gas.

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