Oldest, Massive Black Hole Discovered With JWST Data. Confirms 'Collapsed Gas Cloud' Theory

"Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet," reports the CBC, calling it "a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang."

"The findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe..." Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years. Even more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper — 10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way. It's believed to weigh anywhere from 10 to 100 per cent the mass of all the stars in its galaxy, said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That is nowhere near the miniscule ratio of the black holes in our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies — an estimated 0.1 per cent, he noted. "It's just really early on in the universe to be such a behemoth," said Yale University's Priyamvada Natarajan, who took part in the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. A companion article appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters...

The researchers believe the black hole formed from colossal clouds of gas that collapsed in a galaxy next door to one with stars. The two galaxies merged, and the black hole took over.
The researchers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, reports NASA: "We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole," said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. "We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected." This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing...

This discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses soon after the big bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds of gas, creating black holes weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns? Or do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes weighing only between about 10 and 100 Suns...? Bogdan's team has found strong evidence that the newly discovered black hole was born massive... The large mass of the black hole at a young age, plus the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the galaxy detected by Webb, all agree with theoretical predictions in 2017 by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University for an "Outsize Black Hole" that directly formed from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.

"We think that this is the first detection of an 'Outsize Black Hole' and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas," said Natarajan. "For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind." The researchers plan to use this and other results pouring in from Webb and those combining data from other telescopes to fill out a larger picture of the early universe.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

It's difficult to observe a star formation due to the time scale and distance, so we fill in the blanks with theory.

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[OrangeTide]

All you need two black holes. Put a camera on the event horizon of one black hole

... takes us well over 1000 years to travel to a nearby black hole, let alone a binary. I could find and observe a star like MWC 349 [wikipedia.org] in significantly less time.
No. I think we should build artificial black holes here on Earth. Set them in a row along our south border and we'll make Mexico pay for it.

P.S. I always viewed the Chronovisor story as a sad attempt by otherwise rational people to find irrefutable proof in support of their religious dogma. It belongs in the same bucket as the Young Earth Creationist

Re:

[jd]

I would assume it would have to have collapsed to form multiple supergiants in close proximity, but I can't make the numbers work. Not for a supersized black hole. A stellar one, yes, but not one ten times bigger than Saggitarius A*.

One option would be that there was a lot of primordial helium, so tall wing more mass before fusion began. But even then, it would end up a stellar black hole.

Obviously, it happened so there is a way to make the maths work.

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[joe_frisch]

Just guessing here. Large black holes are low density - the radius goes as the mass, so the density goes as 1/M^2. So maybe at a large enough size the infalling gas creates an event horizon before it becomes hot / dense enough to create enough pressure to stop the collapse. OTOH I'd think angular momentum would stop that from happening, so its confusing.

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[CaptainDork]

You are describing the formation of our solar system incorrectly. Average star formation is dust coalescing to a critical mass where it lights up via nuclear fusion. The Sun's radiation did not blow un-collapsed gas away. The un-collapsed gas coalesced, as well, creating planets. The planets swept up the remaining debris.

TFA is about a black hole created straight from a hugely dense gas cloud such that the star-to-black hole phase is bypassed.

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[RockDoctor]

You're thinking of the "Eddington limit [wikipedia.org]" (or "luminosity"). Which is definitely thought to be a feature in the formation of large stars, today and in the early universe. But the details remain ... convoluted ... obscure ... just plain difficult.

One important characteristic is the transparency of the gas in the cloud. That is strongly affected by the composition of the gas, and the composition of the early universe was significantly different to the recent (today's) universe, with several percent of "metals

False information in summary

[burtosis]

The super massive black hole in question is 50-100 billion solar masses while the one at the center of the Milky Way is 4 million solar masses. That’s 10,000 times the mass and 1,000,000,000,000 times the volume. I think there is a pretty big pile of zeros on the floor of some science editors office.

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[burtosis]

Never mind, thought it was referring to recent articles on phoenix a*. Caffeine before post, caffeine before post.

Great Attractor

[weirdow]

Could this be the great attractor?

Re:Great Attractor

[CaptainDork]

By way of clarification and not by way of comment:

"The Big Attractor is a hypothesized massive structure in the universe that is attracting surrounding galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy, towards it through gravitational force. Here are some key facts about the Big Attractor:

- It is thought to be a large supercluster of galaxies, containing thousands of galaxies, located somewhere beyond the Milky Way's nearby neighboring galaxies.

- Its existence was first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s when astronomers observed the motion of galaxies flowing towards a region in the direction of the Hydra-Centaurus superclusters, approximately 250 million lightyears from the Milky Way.

- The gravitational pull of the Big Attractor is estimated to affect the motion of our entire Local Group of galaxies, as well as tens of thousands of other galaxies across billions of lightyears of space.

- The identity and exact location of the Big Attractor remains unknown due to obstruction from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy blocking our view in its direction.

- It is hypothesized to be a mass concentration perhaps thousands of times more massive than our own Milky Way galaxy, but less massive than the massive Shapley Attractor beyond it.

- Understanding more about structures like the Big Attractor can provide insights into the large-scale structure of the cosmos and the motions of galaxies caused by gravitational interactions across cosmic distances. The search continues to try to map out its precise nature and location." ~ Claude

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[Mal-2]

And in 50,000 or so years, we might have orbited far enough around the galaxy to have a line of sight on it.

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[CaptainDork]

As a very rough estimate, over the course of tens of millions of years, the solar system's motion within the Milky Way may result in changes in our line of sight to the Great Attractor. ~ ChatGPT

Clumpy dark matter

[Mal-2]

If dark matter were sufficiently clumpy (and "cold"), wouldn't it tend to collapse into a point if there aren't any other interactions to slow it down? Ordinarily the inability to shed momentum would make most dark matter "miss" and go into orbit instead, but perhaps the conditions were right for the DM to start essentially motionless.

How could they possibly know it's the OLDEST?

[apparently]

Unless NASA is claiming to have identified *every* black hole in the entire universe they literally have no way of knowing that this one is the oldest.

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[ShanghaiBill]

NASA is not claiming it is the oldest BH in the universe.

NASA is claiming it is the earliest BH so far discovered.

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[RockDoctor]

NASA isn't claiming anything. Some people are interpreting data from observatories that NASA launched, and they are making claims about those interpretations.