An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the universe.
An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the universe.
Astronomers have found supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions times that of the sun in most massive galaxies in the local universe, including in our Milky Way galaxy. These black holes have likely had a major impact on the evolution of the galaxies they reside in. However, scientists still don’t fully understand how these objects grew to become so massive.
The finding of gargantuan black holes already in place in the first billion years after the Big Bang indicates that such growth must have happened very rapidly, and very early. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is shedding new light on the growth of black holes in the early universe.
The new Webb observations have provided evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was just 740 million years old. The system is known as ZS7. The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
