Everyday Telescope: Black holes have been merging for a very long time

Good morning. It’s May 21, and today’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope. It shows the meeting of two massive black holes at the beginning of the universe, just 740 million years after the Big Bang.

The mass of each black hole is estimated to be about 50 million times the mass of our star, the Sun. The discovery of this merger very early in the universe indicates that the growth of these objects in the centers of galaxies occurred very quickly.

Fortunately, Webb and his near-infrared spectrometer are well placed to observe the dense, fast-moving gas characteristic of matter accreting into black holes. When they engulf nearby matter, black holes produce highly ionized gas.

“Our findings suggest that merger is an important pathway through which black holes can grow rapidly, even at cosmic dawn.” He said Hannah Opler from the University of Cambridge. “Together with Webb’s other discoveries about active, massive black holes in the distant universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the beginning.”

source: ESA/WEP, NASA, CSA, et al. the

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