James Webb Space Telescope set to detail most distant supermassive black holes; Here's how

The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing its launch, which is scheduled for December 22, and NASA is revealing the operations it will conduct once deployed into orbit. In a recent report by the agency, it shared another task of the Webb telescope which is to detail the three most distant supermassive black holes, called quasars, and the galaxies around them. With its extreme sensitivity to infrared light, Webb will look to find answers about how the quasars, each of which are over 13 billion light-years from Earth, became so gigantic along with the state of their accompanying galaxies and the "neighbourhoods" around them. 

Webb telescope set to capture light that travelled for billions of years

In order to learn about the black holes and galaxies of the early universe, Webb will collect the light that has travelled for billions of years. As for the discovery of the three supermassive black holes or quasars, the telescope will observe these objects with its unmatched sensitivity and spatial resolution and reveal their complex structures. Interestingly, the light that first emerged from these objects has its wavelengths stretched from ultraviolet and visible light into infrared light as has travelled for over 13 billion years.

According to NASA, the observation and the analysis of the data will be done on three scales where the scientists will first examine the quasars closely, then remove the light from quasars to study the stars in the surrounding host galaxies and finally classify the galaxies nearby the objects. In order to do this, every instrument of the telescope will be brought into use as the scientists plan to refine the measurements of the mass and chemical composition of each supermassive black hole. Jinyi Yang, an astronomer from the University of Arizona said as per NASA-

The existence of these black holes challenges theoretical models. We want to obtain more accurate measurements of their masses to improve our understanding of how they formed and grew so quickly.

In addition to this, NASA also aims to obtain the first images of the stars in the galaxies next to the quasars using Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which they will do by eliminating the light emerging from the black holes using computer models. And as mentioned above, the scientists will try to determine the condition of "neighbourhoods" of these black holes. This will be done by sampling the environments around the quasars meaning the characterisation of the gas and dust, which according to the agency will reveal what was the universe like 700 or 800 million years after the big bang. 

Image: Twitter/@NASA_Webb