An international collaboration of astronomers from France, England, the United States and other nations has identified the oldest and most distant black hole yet seen. The discovery is detailed in a report published in Nature, a leading scientific journal known for breakthrough celestial findings.
The black hole resides in the GN-z11 galaxy, positioned about 13.4 billion light-years from Earth. Given this vast distance, the light captured reflects a time when the universe was roughly 400 million years old, moments after the Big Bang. This makes GN-z11 a window into the universe’s earliest chapters.
Observations gathered with the James Webb Space Telescope reveal that the GN-z11 black hole weighs about 6 million solar masses and is actively accreting matter from its surroundings at a rate roughly five times higher than the maximum rate proposed by current theoretical limits. The enormous pace of growth challenges existing ideas about how such massive objects form in the early cosmos.
Conventional theories of black hole growth in the first billion years after the Big Bang often rely on steady feeding over long timescales to reach millions of solar masses. The GN-z11 object implies that more rapid mechanisms may operate, possibly including direct collapse of massive clouds of cold gas and dust that bypass the traditional stellar birth sequence.
Researchers note that the presence of this ancient black hole likely influenced the evolution of its host galaxy by drawing in gas and dust at the center and then expelling material outward. Those central resources would otherwise fuel new star formation, affecting the pace and pattern of galactic growth over cosmic time.
With this landmark finding, astronomers anticipate uncovering additional ancient black holes in the universe using the James Webb Space Telescope. Each new discovery promises to refine our understanding of how the first supermassive black holes emerged and how they shaped early galaxies.
In related questions about the Milky Way, astrophysicists continue to investigate the source of radiation from the center of our galaxy, a region associated with a compact and powerful central object whose activity remains a focal point of study for high-energy astronomy.
Overall, the GN-z11 discovery marks a pivotal step in mapping the early universe and evaluating how primordial black holes interact with their environments to influence galaxy formation and evolution. The findings invite ongoing observations and theoretical work aimed at revealing the mechanisms that allow such giants to form so swiftly after the birth of the cosmos, and what this means for the population of black holes across cosmic history.
Future missions and deeper surveys with the James Webb Space Telescope are expected to broaden the catalog of ancient black holes, offering new data to test competing theories and to illuminate the pathways that connected the first light of stars to the growth of massive structures in the universe. (Nature)