admin Because it looks so deeply into space, the James Webb Space Telescope looks far back in time – and it recently discovered what scientists believe is the oldest known black hole in the universe. Pillar.
As Live Science notes, the Webb Telescope’s super-powerful sensors helped it detect a supermassive black hole, 10 million times more massive than the Sun and located at the center of a galaxy about 570 million years ago. .
To make that clear, NASA notes that current estimates place the universe at about 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 200 million years old. So he’s an old man, even by cosmic standards.
In an interview with Live Science, University of Texas at Austin, astrophysicist Rebecca Larson, who led the recent search for a very old black hole, noted that although it is the oldest known black hole, discovered so far, “there should be a lot [more] of them”. some of which may be even older. Larson, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, said: “We hope that this black hole is not just [recent] formation, so there will be many younger and earlier black holes that exist. in the universe”. “We’ve just begun to be able to study this period of cosmic history in this way with JWST, and I’m glad we’ve found so much more.”
Far Away
Because light travels through space at a fixed speed, the deeper our telescopes look into the unknown, the farther they go back in time. To see black holes, especially older ones, scientists need special equipment, like JWST’s near-infrared camera and its medium-infrared (MIRI) instrument.
In their paper, which has been posted to the preprint server but has not been peer-reviewed, Larson and his team note that they have found an ancient black hole as part of their search for the Evolution of the Universe. . use JWST to go back to the early universe and see what they find.
Apparently, the investigation is going well if they find such ancient black holes – and who knows what they will discover next.
