Particle.news
Download on the App Store
23 ARTICLES
·
38m ago

Astronomers Confirm Earliest Active Black Hole and Weigh Most Massive Dormant Giant

This pair of discoveries challenges models of black hole seed masses, growth rates, co-evolution with galaxies

The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens. The newly discovered ultramassive blackhole lies at the center of the orange galaxy. Far behind it is a blue galaxy that is being warped into the horseshoe shaped ring by distortions in spacetime created by the immense mass of the foreground orange galaxy. (Credit: NASA/ESA)
© Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin

Overview

  • JWST CAPERS spectroscopy at z = 9.288 revealed broad emission lines from fast-moving gas around a supermassive black hole just 500 million years after the Big Bang, marking the universe’s earliest confirmed AGN.
  • The CAPERS-LRD-z9 black hole’s estimated mass of up to 300 million times the Sun’s, nearly half of its host’s stellar mass, suggests unusually rapid growth or massive initial seeds in the early universe.
  • At roughly 5 billion light-years away, the Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy enabled a direct dynamical measurement of a dormant black hole weighing 36 billion solar masses through combined gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics.
  • The ultramassive dormant black hole resides in a fossil-group galaxy, indicating successive mergers of galaxies and their central black holes as a pathway to its extraordinary mass.
  • Follow-up JWST observations plus forthcoming Euclid data are planned to refine theoretical models of black hole formation, seed assembly and growth across cosmic time.