An international team of astronomers has discovered the oldest black hole, whose existence dates back to an era when the universe was barely 400 years old, according to a million study whose results were recently published.
Jan Schulz, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, said that this discovery postpones the date of the oldest massive black hole by “about 200 million years.”
The co-author of the study published in the journal Nature pointed out that this study “will feed a new generation of theoretical models” to explain the existence of a similar phenomenon in the young universe, more than 13 billion years ago.
The mass of this black hole is estimated to be 1.6 million times the mass of our sun. It is invisible, like all black holes, and absorbs the matter surrounding it by emitting an enormous amount of light in its surroundings.
It is this light that made it possible to discover the Galaxy with the black hole at its heart, which was named “GN-z11” when its discovery was announced in 2016 using the Hubble Space Telescope. GN-z11 was then the oldest galaxy observed by Hubble, and thus the most distant… until the James Webb Space Telescope came into use in 2022, which made it possible to discover the black hole in GN-z11.
The black hole discovered by the international team led by the University of Cambridge dates back to 430 million years after the Big Bang. It is the period of cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born at the end of the so-called “dark” ages.
