New discovery of the oldest black hole in the universe

Research published on January 17 in the scientific journal Nature has revealed interesting findings about the history of the formation of the oldest black hole in the universe.

Picture 1 of New discovery of the oldest black hole in the universe
This illustration released by NASA on February 21, 2013 shows a supermassive black hole in the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. (Illustration: AP)

Previously, based on images observed by the James Webb telescope, scientists believed that this black hole has a mass 1.6 million times that of the Sun. It resides at the center of the ancient galaxy GN-z11 and was born just 430 million years after the Big Bang that formed the universe, which is 200 million years longer than any black hole ever observed. This black hole also possesses characteristics similar to other black holes, being invisible and only detected by giant bursts of light when the black hole 'swallows' all surrounding matter.

Interestingly, this black hole goes against conventional wisdom, which has held that supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies take hundreds of millions, or even billions, of years to form. However, study co-author Stephane Charlot, an astrophysicist at the French Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, suggests that black holes in the early universe may have formed differently than those closer to them.

One hypothesis suggests that the birth of the black hole at the center of the galaxy GN-z11 comes from the explosion of a series of massive stars that only existed in the early universe, or the direct collapse of a dense gas cloud that has not yet entered the star-forming stage. Once born, the black hole will continue to absorb the abundant surrounding gas to continue growing.

Cambridge University astronomer Jan Scholtz - co-author of the study - expects that the James Webb telescope and many other devices, typically the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope, will discover more similar black holes.