Astronomers have discovered the oldest black hole ever discovered, with a mass a million times that of the Sun. The Guardian reported on Sunday (Dec 10) that the black hole dates back more than 13 billion years to the beginning of the universe, citing observations published in Arxiv. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show it to be at the center of a galaxy 440 million years after the Big Bang.
According to the report, the observations of the GN-z11 galaxy push the origins of this mystery back to black holes’ infancy and suggest that they were either born large or ballooned extremely rapidly early on.
There is no direct image of the black hole captured because light cannot escape it. Astronomers did, however, discover telltale signs of its accretion disk, the halo of gas and dust that swirls around the cosmic sinkhole.
A conundrum that appears to be deepening
“The surprise is in it being so very massive,” said Professor Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who led the observations. That was the most surprising thing.”
Professor Andrew Pontzen of University College London (UCL), who was not involved in the research, said the findings suggested that some black holes grew at a much faster rate than expected in the early universe. “Understanding where the black holes came from in the first place has always been a puzzle, but now that puzzle seems to be deepening,” Professor Pontzen told the publication.
The findings are the latest in a long line of breathtaking discoveries by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) space observatory.
What exactly is a black hole?
A black hole, according to NASA, is an astronomical object with such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Its surface is known as the event horizon, and it defines the boundary where the velocity required to escape exceeds the speed of light, which is the universe’s speed limit.
“Two main classes of black holes have been extensively observed. Stellar-mass black holes with three to dozens of times the Sun’s mass is spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy, while supermassive monsters weighing 100,000 to billions of solar masses are found in the centres of most big galaxies, ours included,” NASA said.
Once formed, black holes can expand by absorbing matter that falls into them, such as gas ripped from nearby stars or even other black holes.
