Cape Canaveral – He Webb space telescope discovered the earliest known black hole merger.
These two enormous black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the Big Bang, which gave rise to the universe. It is the most distant black hole merger ever detected, scientists reported Thursday.
One of the black holes is 50 million times more massive than our Sun. The other is thought to be a similar size, but it is immersed in dense gas, making it more difficult to measure.
Until now, astronomers weren't sure how supermassive black holes grew so big.
The most recent findings, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyindicate that mergers are the means by which black holes grow so quickly, “even at the cosmic dawn,” said Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study.
“Massive black holes have shaped the evolution of galaxies since the beginning,” Ubler said in a statement.
Launched in 2021 as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope POT, the Webb telescope is the largest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space. This infrared observatory, which is a joint project of USA and Europestudies the universe from a location 1 million miles from Earth.