Astronomers using two NASA space telescopes have found one of the farthest black holes from the solar system using a rare alignment of galaxies to act as a magnifying glass.
Existing just 470 million years after the Big Bang—the event that’s thought to have created our universe 13.8 billion years ago—it’s the most distant black hole yet seen in X-rays. Neither wavelength of light is visible to humans.
It was found using both the James Webb Space Telescope, which sees the universe in infrared, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which sees in x-rays.
Remarkably Distant
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), lead author of a paper published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.”
The black hole—which is at an earlier stage of development that any found before—was found in a galaxy called UHZ1. It’s in a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744, which exists about 3.5 billion light-years from the solar system. Nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster, Abell 2744 is a megacluster of three separate clusters of galaxies and a stunning 50,000 objects.
However, JWST observations revealed UHZ1 to be behind the cluster, a whopping 13.2 billion light-years from the solar system. That makes it just 3% of the universe’s current age.
Einstein Ring
JWST was able to make the discovery thanks to gravitational lensing. It describes a scenario when the gravitational field of a foreground object is so intense that it distorts the space around it and bends the light from an object behind it into circular rings, both revealing its existence and magnifying it. It’s also known as an “Einstein Ring” because it was predicted by the famous physicist Albert Einstein.
Gravitational lensing is the best way to infer the presence of incredibly distant objects and measure their mass. In this case the black hole’s mass is similar to that of its host galaxy—between 10 and 100 million times the mass of our sun. That’s way more mass than expected.
Sure Signs
Once JWST had located it, Chandra spent a couple of weeks observing X-ray light coming from the galaxy, a sure sign of a growing supermassive black hole. Acting as a gravitational lens, Abell 2744 magnified the background galaxy by a factor of four.
The observations could help scientists figure out how black holes at the beginning of the universe appear to have grown so quickly. The paper suggests that this particularly black hole was born big.
“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,” said co-author Andy Goulding of Princeton University. “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.”
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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