Astronomers have detected a black hole dating back 13 billion years – becoming the oldest ever observed.
The James Webb space telescope reveals it to be at the heart of a galaxy 440 million years after the big bang, The Guardian reports.
It is surprisingly big for a black hole, at about a million times the mass of the sun. It also raises the question of how it grew so big.
In the observations, University of Cambridge astrophysicist professor Roberto Maiolino said: “The surprise is in it being so very massive. That was the most unexpected thing.”
During the observations, an image is not taken as no light can escape its grip.
However, astronomers did detect signs of its accretion disk, the halo of gas and dust that swirls rapidly around the cosmic sinkhole, The Guardian reported.
Astronomers say the earliest black holes can help solve the question of how their giant counterparts at the centre of galaxies, such as the Milky Way, grew to be billions of times the mass of the sun.
Until recently, it was assumed they snowballed over a period of nearly 14 billion years, gobbling up stars and other objects, but this scenario cannot fully account for the epic proportions of present-day supermassive black holes.
But this observation of the GN-Z11 galaxy pushes the mystery back to black holes' infancy - suggesting they were either born big or became large extremely rapidly early on.
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