The black hole is located in the galaxy CEERS 1019.
Release date – Sunday, July 23 at 03:15pm
San Francisco: Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date.
The black hole is located in the galaxy CEERS 1019.
“The CEERS 1019 galaxy existed only 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole has a mass less than any other black hole that has been found in the early universe. Not only that, but they also easily “shook out” two other galaxies also located in the Black holes on the smaller side, which existed 1 and 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang,” NASA said.
According to the space agency, the black hole inside CEERS 1019 is more similar to the black hole at the center of our galaxy, with a mass 4.6 million times that of the sun.
“Observing this distant object with this telescope is a lot like observing data from black holes in our nearby galaxies,” Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, who led the discovery, said in a statement.
Additionally, NASA has discovered another pair of small black holes — the first in the galaxy CEERS 2782 and the second in the galaxy CEERS 746.
“Researchers have known for a long time that there must be lower-mass black holes in the early universe. Webb is the first observatory to capture them with such clarity,” explained team member Dale Koczewski of Colby College.
“Now we think that lower-mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered,” he added.
In addition, the NASA telescope discovered 11 galaxies that formed between 47 billion and 675 million years ago in the universe, which is significant because the researchers predict that Webb will find even fewer galaxies at these distances.
