In the remotest depths of the observable Universe, at a distance of 13.4 billion light years from us, lurks a cosmic monster almost as old as the Universe itself. It’s about the oldest black hole ever detecteda space fossil just observed for the first time by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge.
The discovery was possible thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, which captured the radiation emitted by the otherwise invisible matter devoured by the black hole. This light traveled for billions of years before reaching us so, according to scientists, the black hole was already present 400 million years after the Big Bang.
This black hole is a real heavyweight, with a mass 1.6 million times greater than that of the Sun contained within the event horizon. To reach such a high mass, this celestial body must have absorbed a large amount of matter.
“The very first galaxies were extremely rich in gas”explains one of the discoverers “so they would have been like gods gigantic buffets for black holes”.
The existence of the newly discovered object confirms some theories regarding the formation of primordial supermassive black holes. In fact, it is possible that this black hole was not formed by the death of a star, as usually happens, but directly from the superdense matter that permeated the Universe during the first moments of its history.