Since the universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years old, the black hole in the galaxy named UHZ1 is about 13.2 billion years old.
Even more astonishing for scientists is that this black hole is really huge: 10 times larger than the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the AP agency points out, referring to information from the US space agency NASA. (Sagittarius A* is located 26,000 light-years from Earth and, according to calculations, has the mass of four million Suns – editor’s note).
The new findings published on Monday, November 6 in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy thus confirm the previous theories that “supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe”.
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Even so, the scientist is surprised that the newly discovered black hole “only” needed 470 million years after the big bang to reach its dimensions.
After the merger of the galaxies, space was dominated by a black hole
According to the study’s lead author Ákos Bogdán of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, experts believe that the mass of a given black hole equals the mass of all the stars in the host galaxy “from 10 to 100 percent.”
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Astronomers believe that the black hole formed from colossal clouds of gas that collapsed in a galaxy adjacent to the stars. The two galaxies then merged into one galaxy UHZ1 and the black hole took over “rule”.
| Over the past year, the James Webb Telescope and the Chandra Observatory have tentatively joined forces to make the observations. The researchers then combined and confirmed their data. It is a combination of X-rays from the orbiting Chandra and infrared spectrum data provided by Webb, which observes the universe from a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. | |||
| Both space telescopes used a technique called gravitational lensing to magnify the region of space where this UHZ1 galaxy and its black hole are located. The telescopes used light from a much closer galaxy cluster, about 3.2 billion light-years from Earth, to magnify UHZ1 and its black hole. |
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