The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered the oldest black hole ever seen, an ancient monster with a mass of 1.6 million suns lurking 13 billion years into the universe’s past. The James Webb Space Telescope, whose cameras allow us to peer into the past before the beginning of our universe, has detected a supermassive black hole at the center of the newborn galaxy GN-z11, just 440 million years after the beginning of the universe.

And the space-time crack is not the only crack; One of countless black holes that engulfed themselves in terrifying proportions during the Cosmic Star, that is, about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the young universe began to glow for a billion years. years.

It is not clear how cosmic eddies grew so rapidly in scale after the beginning of the universe. But the search for an answer could help explain how today’s supermassive black holes, which anchor entire galaxies, including our own Milky Way, reached such mind-boggling sizes. The researchers published their findings in a preprint database earlier this year. arXivhowever, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Black holes in the early universe “cannot grow quietly and slowly like many black holes in the local universe” [сучасному] Universe,” lead author Roberto Maiolino, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. “They must experience a special birth or formation and a special growth.”

Closer to the present day, astronomers believe that black holes are formed as a result of the collapse of giant stars. But no matter what they look like, they are constantly growing by swallowing gas, dust, stars and other black holes. As they feast, friction causes material to spiral into black holes, the masses heating up and emitting light that can be detected by telescopes, turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN).

The most extreme AGNs are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times more massive than the Sun and shoot out cocoons of gas in bursts of light trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars.

Since light travels at a constant speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper scientists look into the universe, the farther away the light they capture and the further back in time they see. To detect the black hole in the new study, astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras – JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Camera. built-in spectrographs to split light into frequency components.

By analyzing these faint reflections from the early universe, they discovered an unexpected increase in the frequencies contained in the light; This is an important sign that hot material around the black hole is emitting faint light signatures throughout the universe.

The most popular explanations for how these first black holes grew so quickly are that they were formed by the sudden collapse of giant gas clouds or by multiple mergers of star clusters and black holes.