Using two powerful space telescopes of NASA, astronomers were able to sight one of the most distant black holes from the Solar System. They did so by using a rare galaxy alignment to serve as a cosmic magnifying glass.
Most Distant Black Hole Seen in X-Rays
The black hole traces back to 470 million years post-Big Bang. It is at the earliest development stages among any that has ever been spotted in the past.
It is currently the farthest black hole that has ever been seen in X-rays. Neither of the light wavelengths are visible to the human eye.
It was spotted using the infrared-seeing James Webb Space Telescope and x-ray-seeing Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Akos Bogdan from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, the lead author of the study that documents the finding, explains that they needed the JWST to find the far galaxy and the Chandra to stop its supermassive black hole. They maximized a celestial magnifying glass that boosted the detected light amounts.
The black hole was spotted in the UHZ1 galaxy, which is part of a galaxy cluster known as Abell 2744. This cluster, also known as Pandora's Cluster, is situated around 3.5 billion light years away from the Earth's solar system. It is actually a megacluster of three different galaxy clusters and 50,000 cosmic objects.
Interestingly, JWST observations showed that UHZ1 was behind the cluster, situated 13.2 billion light years away from the Earth's solar system. This makes it just 3% of the current age of the Universe.
Cooperation Between JWST and Chandra
It was thanks to gravitational lensing that Webb was able to come across the novel discovery. Gravitational lensing can be likened to a scenario wherein a foreground object's gravitational field is so strong that it bends the surrounding space and bends the light from the object at the back into rings of circles. It sheds light on its existence and magnifies it altogether.
This is also known as the Einstein Ring as it was previously predicted by the famous Albert Einstein.
Gravitational lensing is the best method for inferring a remarkably distant object's presence and gauging its mass. In this specific case, the mass of the black hole is similar to that of its galaxy host, ranging from 10 to 100 million times the Sun's mass.
When the JWST was able to capture it, Chandra then spent several weeks observing the galaxy's X-ray light. This was a sign that a supermassive black hole was growing.
Abell 2744 acted as a gravitational lens and magnified the galaxy's background by a significant factor of four.
The study suggests that the black hole was born to be big. Observations could help specialists know more about black holes from the early Universe and how they grew incredibly fast.
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