Webb Telescope discovers most distant and active supermassive black hole. Know more

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered yet another marvel of the universe as it detected a supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded. According to NASA, the distant black hole lies within CEERS 1019 which is an extremely old galaxy formed 570 million years after the big bang. As per the website, the black hole clocks in at about '9 million solar masses'. The solar mass is a unit that is equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth.

The famous Webb telescope uses highly sensitive instruments to detect such dim black holes that are otherwise invisible. The telescope has identified eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was just 470 to 675 million years old. According to NASA, the black hole within the CEERS that NASA detected is more similar to the black hole detected at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The American space agency also made it clear that the black hole was not as bright as the more massive behemoths that were previously detected. 

Still a mystery

The distant black hole has remained more or less a mystery to the scientists, hence, it is still not clear how such a black hole was formed in the early stage of the universe. “We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances,” CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, said in a statement. “A galaxy merger could be partly responsible for fueling the activity in this galaxy’s black hole, and that could also lead to increased star formation,” she furthered. 

The news revelations and the brilliance of the Hubble telescope gives scientists the opportunity to detect other such galaxies that are present in the far universe. “Webb was the first to detect some of these galaxies,” said Seiji Fujimoto, a NASA Hubble Fellow at UT Austin said in a statement. “This set, along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history,” Fujimoto furthered. The researchers noted that this black hole within CEERS 1019 may only remain the most distant active supermassive black hole to be ever recorded for a brief time.