The state-of-the-art Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant black hole merger ever. This merger occurred only 740 million years after the universe was created. This is the first time astronomers have observed a merger so early in the history of the universe, a record-breaker.
Black holes are massive celestial bodies scattered throughout our universe. Their gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape the event horizon. A black hole merger is exactly what it sounds like. A slow, terrifying dance takes place between the two celestial bodies, often at the center of their respective galaxies, until they finally merge into one celestial body.
The most recent merger observation was made by the astronomy team in May 2023 using the Webb Telescope’s NIRSpec-IFU instrument. The meeting of the cosmic holes occurred in a galaxy called ZS7 when the universe was about 3/5ths of a billion years old (for reference, the current universe is 13 billion years older than that!) .
The merger was discovered thanks to spectroscopic signatures of accreting black holes that are actively taking in matter, invisible to ground-based telescopes. Thankfully, Webb is in L2, a region of space a million miles from Earth that allows us to peer even deeper into space.
Hannah Uebler, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, said: “Our results demonstrate that mergers are an important pathway for black holes to grow rapidly, even at the dawn of the universe. ESA said. release. “Together with Webb’s other discoveries of 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. ”
Webb’s vision was so sharp that the researchers were able to spatially separate the two black holes, revealing some of their physical characteristics. One of the holes has a mass about 50 million times that of the Sun, and the other is covered with a dense gas cloud. The team’s full paper on this discovery is below. published Published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
When black holes merge, sends out a gravitational shock wave It compresses and stretches spacetime over billions of light years. These waves are detected by observatories such as those managed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. Gravitational waves were first detected in 2015.
But understanding the gravitational universe has a bright future. Officially adopted by ESA The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a space-based gravitational-wave observatory, was installed in January, paving the way for the spacecraft’s eventual launch and operations.
“Webb’s results show that light objects detectable by LISA should be much more frequent than previously assumed,” said Nora Luetsgendorf, lead project scientist for LISA at the European Space Agency. ” said in the same release. “We’ll probably adjust the model to her LISA velocity in this mass range. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Taken together, the next generation of space telescopes is revealing not only the earliest black holes, but also their frequency in the universe. Unraveling the mysteries of black holes – how they grow and form as they interact with the surrounding region – is an important step for astrophysicists in understanding some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe. Helpful.
more: 9 things you didn’t know about black holes
