Astronomers spot earliest confirmed black hole
The James Webb Space Telescope is discovering monster black holes at the dawn of time. Scientists are struggling to explain how these supermassive black holes were born so soon after the Big Bang.
An international team of astronomers have spotted the most distant confirmed black hole known. The black hole is located within the galaxy designated as CAPERS-LRD-z9, at an incredible distance of 13.3 billion lightyears from the Earth. The black hole was formed within 500 million years of the Big Bang, when the universe was only three per cent of its present age. The object appears as a little red dot in imagery captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. There are some candidates for black holes that spawned even earlier, but CAPERS-LRD-z9 is the most distant, and earliest black hole with the confirmed spectroscopic evidence of swirling gas surrounding the object.
The object was identified as part of a dedicated survey using Webb to investigate the most distant galaxies. The survey, named CAPERS for CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey, revealed a new class of dusty, dense galaxies called Little Red Dots, that are compact yet unexpectedly bright. These galaxies exist only at the dawn of time, and were produced within the first 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Conventional theories on astrophysics do not allow for such massive black holes to be formed so rapidly after the Big Bang, leading scientists to suspect an alternative route of formation, one in which the black hole is born large from the direct collapse of a molecular cloud, as against from a series of mergers of stellar mass black holes, the remnants of large dead stars.
Improved understanding of Little Red Dots
The discovery of CAPERS-LRD-z9 provides additional evidence supporting the theory that supermassive black holes are the source of the unexpected luminosities of the Little Red Dots. The galaxy itself potentially explains the distinctive red colouration of the Little Red Dots, that can be caused by light moving through the dusty environment surrounding the black holes. The black hole is estimated to contain 300 million times the mass of the Sun, which is about half the mass of all the stars in the host galaxy. The researchers plan to gather higher-resolution observations of the target using Webb. A paper describing the findings has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.