Astronomers Uncover Colossal 13.2 Billion-Year-Old 'Behemoth' Black Hole

Scientists have made a remarkable finding, identifying the most ancient black hole ever observed in the cosmos. This discovery was made possible through NASA telescopes and has revealed a black hole in its infancy, a stage of growth previously unseen, with a mass comparable to that of its hosting galaxy.

According to a release by Harvard University, this result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. By combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers was able to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole just 470 million years after the big bang.

According to the Nature Astronomy study, UHZ1 has a redshift of 10.1, which suggests that it takes light from UHZ1 13.72 billion light-years to reach Earth.

"It's thrilling to be able to reveal the presence of a supermassive black hole, in place at the centre of a galaxy a mere 450 million years after the Big Bang," said Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and professor of physics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy. "NASA's Chandra space telescope detected X-rays from this distant quasar, which harbours an outsized black hole in its centre."

"We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole," said Akos Bogdan of the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. "We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected." This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing.

Bogdan and his team found the black hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, has revealed the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was only 3% of its current age.