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Journalism of Courage
Researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect an extremely red, gravitationally lensed supermassive black-hole in the early Universe. The black hole’s colours suggest that it lies behind a veil of dust that obscures much of the light from the material it is consuming.
A study on the black hole was published in the journal Nature earlier this month. The group of astronomers behind the discovery had detected what seemed to be a lensed object similar to a quasar from the early universe in Webb telescope image. Quasars are bright active galactic nuclei or supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies.
Black holes “accrete” material before consuming it. This accretion lets out massive amounts of radiation brighter than the galaxy it is hosted in, causing it to appear like a bright star sometimes. The image from which the researchers identified the images was of a field of a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744.
This cluster had so much mass that it bent spacetime, along with the light rays that were travelling near it. This created a “gravitational lens” that magnified background objects and other galaxies behind the cluster. This lensing allows researchers to look at more distant galaxies than otherwise possible.
“We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data. We were scanning the data that arrived for the UNCOVER programme and three very compact yet red-blooming objects prominently stood out and caught our eyes. Their ‘red-dot’ appearance immediately led us to suspect that it was a quasar-like object,” said Lukas Furtak, co-author of the study, in a press statement.
The researchers used a numerical lensing model and found that the three red dots were multiple images of the same source, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old. After using spectrum data from the three images, the researchers confirmed that it was a supermassive black hole.
