Webb and Chandra discover most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays

Two of NASA's powerful telescopes have made a groundbreaking discovery - the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays.

The discovery was made possible using X-ray data from Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope (red, green and blue).

Located in the galaxy UHZ1, the newly discovered supermassive black hole is at an early stage of growth and its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy. UHZ1 is 13.2 billion light-years away, seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age.

"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 (CfA) 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.

The team has also found evidence that the young black hole in UHZ1 was born massive, with its mass estimated to fall between 10 and 100 million Sun.

NASA's Chandra & Webb telescopes have joined forces to discover the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays! The supermassive black hole, located about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, is seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age: https://t.co/cYOC0P5u1b pic.twitter.com/eS4nYAl4S6

— Chandra Observatory (@chandraxray) November 6, 2023

This discovery may help astronomers understand how the first supermassive black holes formed in the universe - do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds of gas, creating black holes weighing between about ten thousand and a hundred thousand suns? or do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes weighing only between about ten and a hundred suns?