The James Webb Telescope allows researchers to peer into the most distant black hole

Astrophysicists from several countries around the world have achieved, thanks to James Webb Space Telescope “look” at one of most massive and distant black holes from Earth, located about 13 billion light years away and when the Universe was “only” about 800 million years old.

results search workin which several astrophysicists from the Center of Astrobiology (CAB), dependent on the Supreme Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), played an important role, are published this Monday in the journal Nature. Astronomy.

And the most “surprising” thing for the researchers, CAB said in a note published this Monday, was the confirmation that this distant and massive black hole is “feeding” in the same way as the latest and closest black holes in the Universe.

Astrophysicists have been trying to explain for many years how black holes wonin the earliest times of the Universe, its extraordinary massand new results obtained from observations with the James Webb Space Telescope now rule out the existence of “exotic” mechanisms that have been proposed as a possible solution to these questions.

“Cosmic Dawn”

Because the first 1 billion years cosmic history – the so-called “cosmic dawn”“- challenge science to discover how the first black holes became so massive and so accelerated, since those known at the centers of galaxies have surprisingly large masses.

Since then, stars and galaxies have changed greatly, and over the past 13.8 billion years lifespan of the universeGalaxies grew and gained greater mass either because they absorbed surrounding gas or, sometimes, because they merged with each other.

This is why astronomers were surprised when, over the past twenty years, observations of quasars (very bright and distant galaxies in the solar system) discovered several very young black holes that nevertheless reached enormous masses, up to 10 billion solar masses.

CAB has explained that light takes time to travel from a distant objectThus, “looking” at distant objects means looking into the distant past and seeing the most distant known quasars as they were at the time of the “cosmic dawn”, which is about a billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and stars formed. galaxies.

Spanish Science and Technology

There are many explanations that Researchers have gone so far as to try to explain how the first black holes appeared. so massive and so fast, although no scientific rationale is fully accepted, but the instruments that James Webb includes, including the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, have allowed for a “giant leap” in this research.

This tool was created international consortium of scientists and engineers from the Conseil Superior de la Recherche Scientifique (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), and in exchange for its creation the consortium received a certain amount of observation time.

In 2019, several years before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (an international collaboration between ESA, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency), this international consortium had already decided to use part of this time to observe the most distant quasar known at that time. , object labeled “J1120+0641”.