Webb Detects Most Distant Active Supermassive Black Hole to Date - and It's Small
"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered yet another astounding discovery," reports CNN, "spying an active supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded."The black hole lies within CEERS 1019 - an extremely old galaxy likely formed 570 million years after the big bang - making it more than 13 billion years old. And scientists were perplexed to find just how small the celestial object's central black hole measures. "This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses," according to a NASA news release. A solar mass is a unit equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system - which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth. That's "far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes," according to NASA. "Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun - and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter." The ability to bring such a dim, distant black hole into focus is a key feature of the Webb telescope, which uses highly sensitive instruments to detect otherwise invisible light... The relative smallness of the black hole at CEER 1019's center is a mystery for scientists. It's not yet clear how such a small black hole formed in the early days of the universe, which was known to produce much larger gravity wells. NASA's announcement emphasized the power of the James Webb Space Telescope. "Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate." The survey also recorded evidence of eleven new galaxies - which are still "churning out new stars," according to NASA. A member of the team says these new galaxies, "along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history."
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