NASAThe black hole in the galaxy GN-z11 (close-up), with a mass of about 1 million solar massesNASA
Just 440 million years after the Big Bang created the Universe around 13.8 billion years ago, the galaxy GN-z11 already had a black hole of around 1 million solar masses. The James Webb telescope, managed by NASA, captured indirect evidence of the existence of this supermassive object in the infancy of the Cosmos, which is the oldest known black hole. “The surprise is in it being so very massive. That was the most unexpected thing,” said Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist from the University of Cambridge, UK, who led the observations at James Webb, to the British newspaper The Guardian. There are no direct images of the black hole, from which not even light can escape, but there are clues that at the center of the galaxy, there is an accretion disk, a halo of gas and dust that orbits the black hole, gradually heating up, losing speed, and falling into the hole. There is a consensus that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. New data provided by the James Webb telescope just over two years ago indicate that black holes existed in the Universe’s infancy. They appear to have formed earlier than astrophysicists previously thought (LiveScience, December 17, 2023; Nature, January 17).
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