As the earliest black hole seen in X-rays, it could reveal how these mammoths grow so large
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed the most distant black hole ever seen with X-rays. Dating from just 470 million years after the Big Bang, the find gives strong weight to the theory that supermassive black holes start their lives large in size, rather than growing over time.
The black hole, located in the galaxy UHZ1, was initially found in the infrared by JWST, with later observations from Chandra finding strong X-ray emissions.
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” says Akos Bogdan from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, who led the study. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.”
This magnification was an effect known as gravitational lensing. The light from UHZ1 was bent by the gravity of a galaxy cluster closer to Earth. This magnifies the image, similar to if the light had passed through a lens, and allowed Chandra to detect the galaxy’s X-ray emission. This showed the presence of superheated gas – a tell-tale sign that a supermassive black hole lies at the centre.
Such early
