Astronomers found the farthest black hole ever seen. It’s in a galaxy named GN-z11 and it’s much larger than expected for its age.
GN-z11 is about 32 billion light-years away from Earth. It was discovered in 2016 and was the most distant known galaxy for a while. Now, before you say that’s impossible because the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, remember that the universe is expanding, so there’s more space between us and the galaxy now than when the light left it.
To study this galaxy, astronomers used the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. They spotted the hot, ultraviolet glow of an accretion disc, which is swirling dust and gas that indicates the presence of a supermassive black hole. This black hole is the farthest one ever seen, and based on its size, scientists estimate it’s about a billion years old.
This creates a big problem. Because of the limit of how fast light travels, we’re seeing GN-z11 as it was 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, the universe wasn’t old enough for that black hole to exist.
This suggests that our ideas about how black holes form and grow might need to be adjusted. One possibility is that they formed from huge clouds of gas collapsing, which would give them more mass right from the start and allow them to grow faster. Another idea is that black holes with more nearby matter can feed and grow faster than we thought. It’s possible that both of these ideas are true at the same time.
“It’s unusual to find such a massive black hole so early in the universe, so we need to consider other ways they might form,” said Professor Roberto Maiolino, who led the study. “In the early universe, galaxies had a lot of gas, so they would have been like a buffet for black holes.”
ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser
This isn’t the first time the James Webb telescope has found something that seems too advanced for its age. It’s already seen several galaxies that were thought to contain more mass than the entire universe at that time. Some of these galaxies also had structures similar to the Milky Way earlier than expected.
Astronomers are working hard to understand these findings. They’re suggesting various explanations, like galaxies going through intense star-forming phases or stars powered by dark matter that only look like galaxies from far away. Some are even suggesting that the universe might be twice as old as we previously thought.
We’ll need more observations to figure out this big cosmological puzzle. The researchers from the new study want to use future data from the Webb telescope to find more black hole beginnings.
