Astronomers find oldest black hole and it solves a scientific enigma

Astronomers have found what is the oldest black hole ever discovered. Two NASA telescopes were used to discover the supermassive black hole that was formed more than 13 billion years ago.

Artistic illustration of the oldest black hole ever discovered. (Michael S. Helfenbein / Yale University)

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Astronomers say they have found what is the oldest black hole ever discovered. The X-ray quasar was formed around 470 million years after the Big Bang. To put that into context, the Big Bang is thought to have happened about 13.8 billion years ago. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

The supermassive black hole described in Nature Astronomy has about the same as the combined mass of the stars in the galaxy it resides in. Beyond its significance as the oldest known black hole, it also offers proof to suggest that the early universe is “seeded” with heavy black hole seeds with large birth masses that form from direct collapse, according to Yale University.

Direct collapse black holes

For a long time, it was believed that black holes could only form from “light seeds” that were created by the explosion of stars. But that theory had a “problem of timing.” The problem was that it did not leave enough time for black holes to grow into the sort of humongous sizes that astronomers are now able to observe really far back in time.

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Priyamvada Natarajan, coauthor of the paper, came up with a different theory in 2006. She developed a new model where “heavy” black hole seeds could form in galaxies where star formation was suppressed. These are the satellite galaxies that are close to the galaxies that formed the first stars. In the model, large disks of gas in the satellite galaxies could collapse into heavy black hole seeds and then rapidly merge into their parent galaxies.

Discovered using two NASA telescopes

Fast forward to the present, and researchers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to look behind the galaxy Abel 2744. The massive galaxy was acting as a cosmic lens. Essentially, its massive gravity was bending the light coming from behind it in such a way that it was possible to see distant objects behind it better.

The newly-discovered black hole offers compelling evidence to suggest that Natarajan’s theory that black hole seeds are produced through multiple different scenarios.

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