Webb telescope discovers oldest black hole yet

Black hole was vigorously gobbling up its host galaxy just 430m years after birth of universe during period called cosmic dawn

By AFP
January 18, 2024
This image released on January 17, 2024, shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). — The Hubble Space Telescope website via NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)
This image released on January 17, 2024, shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). — The Hubble Space Telescope website via NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)

PARIS: The James Webb space telescope has discovered the oldest black hole ever detected, which was thriving so soon after the Big Bang that it challenges our understanding of how these celestial behemoths form, astronomers said on Wednesday.

The black hole was vigorously gobbling up its host galaxy just 430 million years after the birth of the universe during a period called the cosmic dawn, according to a study in the journal Nature. That makes it 200 million years older than any other massive black hole ever observed, study co-author and Cambridge University astronomer Jan Scholtz said.