
A team of researchers discovered a growing black hole 470 million years after the Big Bang. The black hole is the oldest ever detected, dating to just 470 million years after the Big Bang. The cosmic structure is so old that if the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe were squeezed into one calendar year, it would date to just the second week of January.
The result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. The research relied on data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which allowed scientists to identify some of the earliest galaxies known in the universe.
The black hole was found in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The team was led by Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet, a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang. Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years
The Big Bang and black holes are two separate phenomena. The Big Bang was the formation of the universe, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. Black holes began to form well after the Big Bang.
Black holes are created when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives. The early universe was incredibly dense, but it was dense everywhere, with barely any differences. Without those differences, black holes couldn’t form, because there was no difference in gravity that could lead to the sudden collapse of matter.
However, some physicists argue that black holes were also born during the Big Bang itself. A hidden population of such “primordial” black holes could conceivably constitute dark matter.
UHZ1 is a background galaxy that contains a quasar. It has a redshift of approximately 10.1 and is located at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years. The galaxy contains a supermassive black hole that is the most distant ever seen in X-rays. The black hole formed just 450 million years after the Big Bang.
The JWST first spotted the feeble light of the early galaxy. The Chandra-JWST discovery of a quasar in the galaxy reveals that accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place. X-ray emission, a key indicator of a growing supermassive black hole, has been found in UHZ1.
The galaxy cluster Abell 2744 is located in the direction of the black hole in UHZ1. The galaxy cluster’s enormous mass is used as a gravitational lens to warp spacetime and magnify even more distant objects directly behind it.
Black holes can grow in size by absorbing matter from their surroundings. They can grow by:
- Eating: Black holes can “eat” gas, stars, planets, and even other black holes
- Colliding: Black holes can grow by colliding and merging with other black holes
- Accreting: Black holes can grow by the accretion of matter nearby that is pulled in by their immense gravity
Black holes can also slowly shrink because they are losing tiny amounts of energy called “Hawking radiation”. Black holes have a size limit of 50 billion suns.
The prevailing theory is that supermassive black holes are seeded by smaller, pre-existing black holes. The majority of their mass growth is thought to occur through episodes of rapid gas accretion, which are observable as active galactic nuclei or quasars.
The largest black holes in the universe are millions and even billions of times more massive than the sun. To reach such incredible sizes, they’ve consumed an all-you-can-eat buffet of gas over billions of years.
The largest black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow. Larger black holes of up to 1014 (100 trillion) M ☉ may form during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of 10109 to 10110 years
Yes, black holes can shrink. Physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes slowly shrink because they lose tiny amounts of energy called “Hawking radiation”. Hawking radiation occurs because empty space, or the vacuum, is not really empty.
With every bit of energy that escapes, the black hole loses mass and thereby shrinks, eventually popping out of existence altogether. A typical black hole would take many billions of times the age of the Universe to completely “evaporate” and disappear.
It was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe.
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