![]() ![]() Panel #1 shows a massive gas cloud and a galaxy moving towards each other. How a large black hole can form from the direct collapse of a massive cloud of gas a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. 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 paper co-author Andy Goulding of Princeton University. “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. Understanding the formation scenario helps astronomers understand the conditions at the time. Were they born from the collapse of massive gas clouds to create black holes ranging up to 100,000 solar masses? Or, were the explosions of the first supermassive stars the culprit? If So, the mass of those black holes would have been only 10 to 100 solar masses. First, you have to understand how they formed. It’s not completely clear how some supermassive black holes grew to be so massive so quickly after the Big Bang. ![]() In particular, they open a window on black hole formation. Quasars in the early Universe tell us a lot about conditions in the time after the Big Bang. Quasars With Black Holes in the Infant Universe This indicated to them that the black hole is rapidly eating up material around it. Chandra observed it for two weeks and found a huge amount of X-ray emissions from superheated gas in the galaxy. Webb spotted it thanks to faint infrared signals from the activity surrounding the black hole. That light left the quasar when the Universe was only 3 percent of its current age. Its light is magnified by passing through the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The black hole is the heart of a quasar-an active galaxy called UHZ1. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” Essentially astronomers got their data through a gravitational lens, then combined data from both orbiting telescopes to create a unique look at the black hole. Bogdan and his team just published a paper about the observations. “We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard. It’s also just bright enough in infrared light for the James Webb Space Telescope to see. This monster black hole is really bright in X-rays, which made it a great target for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It appears as it did when the Universe was only 470 million years old. Recently astronomers discovered the most distant (and therefore earliest) supermassive black hole ever seen. One of the big questions in cosmology asks when black holes first showed up in the early Universe. ![]()
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