James Webb Telescope Discovers Supermassive Black Hole in Early Universe

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy named CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang.

This galaxy is part of a category referred to as 'Little Red Dots,' which are small, bright, and extremely distant galaxies that challenge existing models of galaxy evolution and black hole formation. Team leader Roberta Tripodi from the University of Ljubljana remarked on the significance of this find, stating that the black hole's rapid growth is unexpected for such an early time in the universe's history.

The black hole at the heart of CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 has an estimated mass around 100 million times that of our sun, which is extraordinarily massive for a compact galaxy at this stage of evolution. The findings were facilitated by the analysis of light and spectral features using the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, revealing highly ionized gas swirling around this compact region, indicative of a feeding black hole.

This discovery poses questions about the conventional understanding of the relationship between black holes and their host galaxies. Typically, the mass of central supermassive black holes is linked to the mass of their surrounding stars, but the black hole in CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 is much more massive than expected given the galaxy's stellar mass.

This indicates that black holes may have grown much faster than the galaxies that house them, highlighting a potential revision in our understanding of early black hole and galaxy formation. The CANUCS research team plans to conduct further observations of CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 with JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to explore the cold gas in this galaxy and refine their understanding of its central black hole.

They hope to identify more galaxies like CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, which could offer deeper insights into the origins of black holes and galaxies during the universe's infancy. This discovery is positioned as an exciting step in understanding the formation of the first supermassive black holes and their rapid growth in the early universe.