X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand
- NASA has discovered the most distant black hole ever, dating back nearly to the dawn of time.
- Don't worry: the growing black hole is located 13.2 billion light-years away.
- The supermassive black hole was detected in a rare state of infancy.
NASA has discovered the most distant black hole ever detected, capturing it growing in a stage of never-before-seen infancy near the dawn of time.
The space agency announced this week that it had combined X-ray data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to reveal the presence of the primordial supermassive black hole after spotting a distant galaxy.
Thanks to its large mirror and infrared lens, JWST is able to detect distant stars and galaxies as far as 28 billion light years away.
Located 13.2 billion light-years away from Earth, the black hole dates back to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age, about 470 million years after the Big Bang, NASA said in the press release.
Since light travels at a constant speed, and distant objects are billions of light-years away from us, we see those objects as they looked in the past.
Daniel Rocal / Getty Images
That gives researchers the opportunity to see the early universe moments after it formed. This black hole is the latest in an impressive catalogue of record-breaking discoveries from JWST.
In its first week of operation, JWST found a 13.5 billion-year-old galaxy. It also detected another of the earliest black holes and picked up lots of details Hubble wasn't able to capture.
This black hole, in particular, was captured in a stage of life younger than any others scientists have discovered, at a point when it was still growing and its total mass was similar to that of its host galaxy, NASA said.
Compared to the mass of their host galaxies, supermassive black holes are usually far smaller — about a tenth of a percent the size, per NASA.
Scientists hope the discovery can help them learn how black holes like this were able to grow so big so soon after the dawn of time.
"There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they've formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It's like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed," Andy Goulding, a research scholar at Princeton University and co-author of the study, said in NASA's press release.