Oldest black hole discovered dating 13 billion years old
- The black hole appears to have formed 470 million years after the Big Bang
- It suggests black holes have existed since the start of the universe
- The findings could help scientists solve the mystery of black holes
A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. The stream of gas is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole. A cloud of hot plasma above the black hole is known as a corona.(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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(NewsNation) — NASA scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet. It is in a galaxy more than 13 billion years old and may help solve a cosmic mystery that links supermassive black holes and the start of the universe.
The findings, published Monday in the Nature Astronomy journal, confirm what were just theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory teamed up over the past year to make the discovery.
There are generally believed to be two types of black holes: stellar mass and supermassive. Stellar mass black holes are estimated to weigh between five and 10 times the sun’s mass while supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun’s mass.
The newly discovered black hole, found in a galaxy named UHZ1, has roughly the same mass as the entire galaxy it resides in.
The report also shows the black hole was formed just 470 million years after the Big Bang, suggesting it didn’t form gradually, but was supermassive from the start.
“There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” said Dr. Andy Goulding, co-author of the study.
The two space telescopes — Webb and Chandra — used a technique called gravitational lensing to magnify the region of space where this galaxy, UHZ1, and its black hole are located.
The telescopes used the light from a much closer cluster of galaxies, a mere 3.2 billion light-years from Earth, to magnify UHZ1 and its black hole much farther in the background.
Scientists plan to use the results and additional data coming in from the Webb telescope to unveil a clearer picture of the early universe.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.