The first direct mass measurement from the early universe weighs in on the debate over the origins of supermassive black holes.
How could a supermassive black hole tens of millions of times the mass of the Sun, a black hole that was already enormous just 700 million years after the big bang, begin with the collapse of a single star? Maybe it didn’t.
Using the unprecedented imaging and spectroscopic power of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have mapped the motion and composition of gas orbiting a black hole in the center of Abell2744-QSO1, a tiny galaxy more than 13 billion light-years away. The results suggest that the 50-million-solar-mass black hole predates its host galaxy, possibly forming within the first second of the big bang, and must have been immense from the start.
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