NASA said on Thursday that its James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest supermassive black hole in the center of the CEERS 1019 galaxy.
According to the US space agency, the black hole was shaped only 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass of 9 million times sun.
“Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed just over 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe,” NASA said in a statement on its website.
The US space agency also said the scientists have “easily shaken out” two more black holes that are “also on the smaller side, and existed 1 and 1.1 billion years after the big bang.”
The James Webb telescope also identified 11 galaxies that existed when the universe was 470 to 675 million years old.
NASA further said the black hole of CEERS 1019 that is discovered to be the oldest yet “clocks in at about 9 million solar masses, far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes.”
It added: “Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun – and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter.”
As part of the James Webb Space Telescope’s CEERS research, infrared images and spectrum data taken by the telescope are combined to map the early universe.
It was determined that the oldest black holes detected before the discovery in question were formed 1 billion years after the Big Bang.