Oldest Black Hole Discovered Is Eating Host Galaxy Alive at Exceptionally High Rate [Study]

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman, cmglee)
Oldest Black Hole Discovered Is Eating Host Galaxy Alive at Exceptionally High Rate [Study]

Scientists just discovered the oldest black hole. However, it made them realize a few things that they didn't think was the case before.

Oldest Black Hole Speedily Munching on Host Galaxy

In a new study, the researchers discovered that the oldest black hole was already 13 billion years old. It was reportedly born just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which created the universe, happened.

The black hole was discovered in a galaxy known as GN-z11, whose extraordinary brightness has fascinated scientists for a long time. It is situated within a compact, extremely bright galaxy that the Hubble Space Telescope first discovered. But for years, the nature of the galaxy's extraordinary luminosity remained a mystery since it would need an extraordinarily high number of young stars within the galaxy's compact area, per Roberto Maiolino, study co-author and professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. The recent JWST observations have shown that the heated gas circling the black hole is causing the high illumination, not the stars.

This black hole may consume gas in its host galaxy too quickly, causing it to die eventually. Black holes eject any leftover gas, which could prevent new stars from forming. When the black hole runs out of stars to eat, it will not only stop the galaxy from self-sustaining but ultimately destroy it.

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New Study Challenges Previous Black Hole Knowledge

Astronomers' preconceived notions regarding the formation and growth of black holes are questioned after the results of the recent study were revealed.

It has long been believed that supermassive black holes develop very slowly over billions of years to reach their enormous magnitude. This newly discovered black hole is unusually massive, with a mass a few million times that of the sun. However, scientists may need to reconsider how some black holes got so big because of their extreme youth.

Black holes are created when the cores of dead stars collapse, and they enlarge by consuming materials from their surroundings, including gas, dust, and other stars. This ancient black hole would have taken a billion years to attain its current size at the pace at which scientists believed black holes consumed stuff, but by the time it did, the entire cosmos had not yet been around for a billion years.

"The novelty of our study is not only about having found the oldest black hole but also the fact that our data can provide a measurement of the black hole mass and of the rate at which it's accreting matter from its host galaxy," Maiolino said.

Therefore, this result suggests that black holes may form differently than they initially imagined, such as by being "born big" or consuming matter more quickly.

The expert noted that its large size at such an early time in the universe, which defies explanation by conventional theories, is what surprises more than its age. It's eating matter at an unusually high pace, which was previously believed to be improbable, which is another startling discovery.

This additional finding suggests that the growth of early black holes may be substantially faster than predicted by earlier models. A different possible hypothesis is that black holes are born large (these are known as Direct Collapse Black Holes), which might account for the galaxy's black hole's current size, which is very massive.