MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that existed 470 million years after the Big Bang, and it’s proving to be enlightening

Reported by David Crookes

An artist’s impression of what a supermassive black hole would look like at the heart of a galaxy

© NASA

Supermassive black holes range from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our S Sun, and they’re thought to be at the centre of almost every large galaxy in the universe. But while scientists know plenty about them despite having only confirmed a handful, quite how they were formed remains something of a mystery. They puzzle astronomers because some of them are known to have formed very early in the universe’s life. While most black holes are created out of the remnants of a large star dying in a supernova explosion when it reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity, this doesn’t explain how supermassive black holes emerged less than 700 million years after the Big Bang – and how they became so colossal. There just wouldn’t have been enough time for these huge black holes to form.

But a recent discovery may go some way towards a better understanding of how some supermassive black holes were able to form and reach such a great mass so early in the universe’s life. By making use of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been able to locate a distant galaxy called UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which is nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster. With the aid of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have been able to find the most distant black hole ever seen in X-rays and make some startling discoveries.

If nothing else, the study – which involved Ákos Bogdán of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Andy Goulding of Princeton and Priyamvada Natarajan, chair of the department of astronomy at Yale – has shown the immense power of NASA’s telescopes. In particular, it’s proving once more why Webb, which entered service in July 2022, is worth every cent of its multi-billion-dollar construction. But it’s also shedding fresh light on what we know about black holes and how there is now a new class of distant objects. “The detection of this black hole was part of a dedicated observing campaign,” Bogdán tells All About Space. “Webb observed Abell 2744 in multiple observing programs with the goal of identifying galaxies in the early universe. We built our Chandra observing program on these Webb observations. The goal of the Chandra program was to detect accreting supermassive black holes in galaxies that were identified by Webb.”