This distant black hole has been discovered! 13.2 billion light years away from Earth

US astronomers discover distant black hole using X-rays

NASA said on the 6th that astronomers jointly used the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the most distant black hole discovered so far through X-rays.

Akosh Bogdan and others from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States published a related paper in the latest issue of the British journal Nature Astronomy. According to reports, this black hole is located in a galaxy code-named UHZ1, which is about 13.2 billion light-years away from the Earth, which means it was formed when the universe was still very young.

Bogdan said the research team used observation data from the James Webb Telescope to find this extremely distant galaxy, and used data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover the supermassive black hole located in it.

Based on the X-rays and other features emitted by the black hole as it devours the surrounding matter, researchers estimate that the mass of this black hole is between 10 million and 100 million times the mass of the sun. This is similar to the total mass of all the stars in the galaxy in which it is located. However, in the nearby cosmic region, the mass of the black hole in the galaxy is often much smaller than the total mass of the stars in it.

The researchers believe that the characteristics of this black hole support the theory previously proposed by some astronomers that large black holes were formed in the early universe due to the collapse of huge nebulae. The researchers plan to further analyze the relevant data to explore the mysteries of the early universe in more depth.

Source: Xinhua News Agency