Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by finding the most distant active supermassive black hole to date. This black hole, located in the galaxy CEERS 1019, existed approximately 570 million years after the big bang. Interestingly, it is less massive than any other black hole identified in the early universe.
Alongside the black hole in CEERS 1019, the researchers also detected two smaller black holes that existed 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the big bang. Furthermore, JWST identified eleven galaxies that were present when the universe was between 470 million and 675 million years old.
The evidence for these findings was obtained through JWST’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, which was led by Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. This program utilized JWST’s highly detailed near- and mid-infrared images and spectra data to make these significant discoveries.
“Examining this distant object with the JWST is akin to studying black hole data from galaxies near our own,” explained Rebecca Larson, a recent Ph.D. graduate at UT Austin who spearheaded the study. “There are numerous spectral lines to analyze.”
The team has published their results in several initial papers featured in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
2023-07-07 03:48:03
Article from phys.org rnrn