The James Webb Telescope has discovered the most distant merger of two gigantic black holes dating to the time of 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. To give perspective, the Big Bang is an event that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. As per a European Space Agency report, the supermassive black holes have masses of millions to billions times that of the Sun in most massive galaxies in the local universe, including in the Milky Way galaxy. The system is known as ZS7. One of the two black holes has a mass that is 50 million times the mass of the Sun, as per the findings. The mass of the other black hole is likely similar, although it is much harder to measure because this second black hole is buried in dense gas. Astronomers continue to question how the supermassive black holes got so big. Lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge, wrote in the findings published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that the mergers could point to why black holes grow so rapidly, even at "cosmic dawn". “We found evidence for very dense gas with fast motions in the vicinity of the black hole, as well as hot and highly ionised gas illuminated by the energetic radiation typically produced by black holes in their accretion episodes,” Ubler said. Launched in 2021 as the eventual successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space.
