A team of scientists found a black hole that formed soon after the Big Bang
Research team identifies oldest known supermassive black hole
This undated artist's conception released by NASA in 1999 shows an intermediate-sized black hole, which exists in the heart of spiral galaxies throughout the universe. NASA/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
The oldest and most distant black hole known to scientists dates back 13.3 billion years ago, when our universe was still in its teething stage, according to findings published this month.
The discovery, made by a research team based out of the University of Texas at Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center, is helping to reshape scientists' understanding of black holes. The cosmic mass is not only old, it's massive — up to 300 million times bigger than our sun. That's remarkable for a black hole that developed so soon after the Big Bang, says Anthony Taylor, who led the research team.
"That begs the question, how did it form so quickly?" Taylor says. "If you look at black holes in the universe, it's not an issue to have very massive black holes because they have 13.8 billion years to grow to the monsters they are today. However, this black hole is already massive, but it only had 500 million years to grow."
The finding is "putting stress on some of our models of how black holes form and how they grow," Taylor added.
The research team detected the black hole using data from NASA's James Webb Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. At first, scientists thought the black hole's home galaxy, called CAPERS-LRD-z9, was just an "interesting speck" in imagery captured by the telescope, according to a statement. They eventually discovered it was part of a new class of galaxies called "Little Red Dots," found only in the early universe.
Taylor says it's impossible to say for sure how far away CAPERS-LRD-z9 is, because of the strange way distances work in our expanding universe.
"It wouldn't be technically correct to say that it's 13.3 billion light years away because as light travels, the universe expands both in front of it and behind it," Taylor says. "So in terms of putting a real distance on it, it's actually a very challenging question, so much so that we almost avoid doing it."
Taylor and his team nevertheless hope the colossal finding provides insights into our own galaxy.
"One of the main points is answering the big question of, how did we get here? And if we're talking about galaxies and black hole evolution in the very early universe, well, we live in a galaxy as well. And our galaxy also has a black hole," Taylor says. "Getting this test case in the early universe gives us hints as to how our own galaxy and its black hole might have evolved."
The digital version of this story was written by Nia Dumas. The broadcast version of this story was produced by Paige Waterhouse and Lisa Thomson.