Scientists discover distant active supermassive black hole

With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have located the most distant active supermassive black hole to date, about 570 million years after the Big Bang.

The CEERS 1019 galaxy appeared recently, and its black hole is the least massive one yet discovered in the early universe. One billion and 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang, scientists discovered two additional black holes that are on the smaller side and were already in existence.

Additionally, 11 galaxies that were present between 470 million and 675 million years ago were found by JWST.

The proof came from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey carried out by the JWST under the direction of astronomy professor Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin.

Rebecca Larson, a recent PhD graduate at UT Austin, who led the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said: "Looking at this distant object with this telescope is a lot like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies near our own. There are so many spectral lines to analyse."

CEERS 1019, according to the researchers, is noteworthy not only for how long ago it existed but also for how little its black hole weighs, The Independent reported.

In comparison to other black holes that existed in the early universe and were discovered by other telescopes, it has a mass of only nine million solar masses.

They typically have a mass that is more than a billion times that of the sun, and because they are much brighter, they are simpler to spot.

Unlike the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, which has a mass 4.6 million times that of the sun, CEERS 1019's black hole is more comparable to that of the galaxy's black hole.

It is challenging to understand how this black hole formed so soon after the universe's creation because it existed so much earlier.

The amount of gas the black hole is consuming was also precisely measured, allowing scientists to calculate the galaxy's star-formation rate.

They discovered that while it is also producing new stars, it is taking in all the gas it can.

We are not accustomed to seeing this much structure in images at these distances, according to CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor of astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

"A galaxy merger could be partly responsible for fueling the activity in this galaxy’s black hole, and that could also lead to increased star formation."

As for the other two black holes, team member Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said: "The central black hole is visible, but the presence of dust suggests it might lie within a galaxy that is also ferociously producing stars.

"Researchers have long known that there must be lower mass black holes in the early universe. Webb is the first observatory that can capture them so clearly.

"Now we think that lower mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered."