As of: January 23, 2024, 11:22 a.m
By: Tanja Banner
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When the galaxy GN-z11 was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, it was the oldest galaxy known to date.
The “James Webb” space telescope has now discovered the oldest black hole known to date.
(Archive image) © NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)
The oldest black hole known to date raises questions.
Its unusual mass could upend scientists' theories.
Cambridge – Roberto Maiolino (University of Cambridge) and a research team have discovered the oldest known black hole in the universe.
This was created just 400 million years after the Big Bang, over 13 billion years ago, and is posing new puzzles to science.
The reason for this lies in the unexpectedly large mass of the black hole.
Research estimates that such an object would have needed about a billion years to reach its observed size.
But it was discovered at a time when the universe was just 400 million years old.
Although massive black holes are already known, they are significantly younger than the newly discovered one.
This raises a big question mark on the previous research assumptions.
Oldest black hole is bigger than thought
For a long time, scientists assumed that supermassive black holes, which are located at the center of galaxies, grow to their enormous size over billions of years.
“It is very early in the universe to see such a massive black hole, so we need to consider other ways they could form,” emphasizes Maiolino, the study leader.
The question of whether black holes form “large” or whether they devour matter five times faster than previously thought is one of the questions that researchers want to clarify.
“Very early galaxies were extremely gas-rich, so they would have been like a buffet for black holes,” explains Maiolino.
Like all black holes, the newly discovered object attracts and devours material from its host galaxy.
However, the black hole eats matter much faster than its relatives from other eras.
Black hole hinders the evolution of its galaxy
The object was discovered in the galaxy GN-z11, which is hundreds of times smaller than our Milky Way.
The research team suspects that the black hole may be hindering the evolution of its galaxy.
When black holes absorb too much gas from their galaxy, that gas is blown away like a strong wind.
This “wind” could stop star formation and slowly “kill” the galaxy.
This would also be detrimental to the black hole, as this process would destroy its “food source”.
Maiolino is enthusiastic about the discovery and speaks in a statement of a “giant step forward” and the “most exciting time of my career.”
He is referring to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which revolutionized the exploration of the universe and also discovered the oldest black hole known to date.
“It's a new era: the huge leap in sensitivity, especially in the infrared, is as if you upgraded from Galileo's telescope to a modern telescope overnight,” said the scientist.
JWST could detect even older black holes in the universe
“Before 'Webb' came online, I thought that the universe might not be that interesting beyond what we could see with the 'Hubble' Space Telescope.
But that wasn't the case at all: the universe was very generous in what it showed us, and this is just the beginning," says the researcher happily.
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Maiolino expects that the JWST could discover even older black holes in the coming months and years.
His team hopes to use the telescope to find smaller “seeds” of black holes.
These could provide information about whether black holes grow quickly or are already large when they form.
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