The James Webb Space Telescope, whose cameras allow us to peer into the past before the birth of our universe, has discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of the young galaxy GN-z11, just 440 million years after the beginning of the universe.

And the space-time crack is not alone; It is one of countless black holes that grew to monstrous sizes during the Cosmic Dawn (the period about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the young universe began to glow for a billion years).

It is not clear how cosmic eddies grew in size so rapidly after the beginning of the universe. But finding an answer could help explain how today’s supermassive black holes, which anchor entire galaxies, including our own Milky Way, reached such staggering sizes. The researchers published their results in the arXiv preprint database, but the study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

It is stated that the giant black hole is more than 13 billion years old and is approximately 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun. Unfortunately, there are no images of the object, but astronomers have discovered characteristic features of the accretion disk, a rapidly rotating halo of gas and dust around the cosmic vent.

Scientists believe early black holes may help us learn how their giant counterparts at the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way grew to billions of times the mass of the Sun.

Until recently, it was assumed that they coalesced into a snowball over about 14 billion years, growing steadily by combining and absorbing stars and other objects. But this snowball scenario cannot fully explain the epic size of today’s supermassive black holes.

One explanation, known as the heavy seed scenario, is that early-generation black holes were born from the direct collapse of large clouds of gas, rather than burnt-out stars collapsing under their own gravity at the end of their lives.

Another hypothesis is the existence of primordial black holes that emerged during cosmic inflation, a period in which the universe expanded at speeds exceeding the speed of light. This event occurred one second after the Big Bang. This version can reverse many of the usual laws of the formation of space objects.

The results are the latest in a series of striking discoveries made two years after NASA’s space observatory launched. James Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than previous telescopes like Hubble at detecting infrared light, the part of the spectrum used to observe the most distant objects. Source