Astronomers have revealed signs, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, of the oldest black hole ever observed, dating back more than 13 billion years.
Strangely, this hole is a million times the mass of the Sun, which is unusual for a small black hole, raising the question of how it could grow so quickly.
Scientists discovered the existence of this hole in the heart of a galaxy that arose 440 million years after the big bang.
The astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, Roberto Maiolino, who led the observations, said, “The surprise is that it is very huge. This was the most unexpected thing,” according to what the Guardian newspaper reported.
The newspaper pointed out that scientists have discovered clear signs of its accretion disk, which is a halo of gas and dust rotating rapidly around the cosmic stream.
Black holes that are millions of times larger than the mass of the Sun are located in the middle of most large galaxies, such as our Milky Way.
Astronomers believe that older black holes could help solve the mystery of how their giant counterparts grow in the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way.
Until recently, it was assumed that it had simply inflated over approximately 14 billion years, growing steadily through mergers and devouring stars and other objects. But this snowball scenario cannot fully explain the epic proportions of today's supermassive black holes.
Scientists' observations of the galaxy, called GNZ11, indicate that black holes were either born large, or inflated very quickly, early on.
“Understanding the source of black holes in the first place has always been a mystery, but it seems that this mystery is deepening now,” said cosmologist Andrew Pontzen at College London, who was not involved in the research. He considered that these results, using the power of the James Webb Telescope, "Some black holes grew at an enormous rate in the young universe, much faster than we expected," notes the spacecraft to look back through time.
One explanation, now proposed, is that an early generation of black holes was born from the direct collapse of huge clouds of gas, rather than from burning stars that collapsed under their own gravity at the end of their lives.
The second possibility is that compact clusters of stars and black holes merged very quickly in the early universe.
The third hypothesis is the existence of so-called primordial black holes that came into existence during cosmic inflation, which is the period when the universe expanded faster than light, which occurred a fraction of a second after the big bang.
If the latter theory is correct, this means that primordial black holes were effectively woven into the fabric of the universe from the beginning, after it was believed that galaxies form first and then black holes begin to grow within them.
“If that is true, it will have profound implications for the opening millisecond of our universe,” Pontzen said. “Either way, the story of how black holes and galaxies came together is an interesting one, and we’re just beginning to piece it together.”