The earliest active supermassive black hole ever seen offers clues on how these enigmatic objects first formed
Two space telescopes paired up to examine a giant black hole that has a mass approximately equal to the galaxy that hosts it. It's an early starter: the galaxy existed just 470 million years after the Big Bang that formed our universe about 13.8 billion years ago. The existence of this black hole is, therefore, a huge clue as to how supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies form.
When Chandra followed up on UHZ1 and observed it for two weeks, it detected powerful X-rays coming from a disk of gas swirling around in the gravitational field of a supermassive black hole at the core of the distant galaxy. UHZ1 is still fairly small for a galaxy, however. Models of galaxy formation describe how they begin small and then grow through mergers, either with other galaxies or gigantic intergalactic gas clouds. What isn't understood very well is how their supermassive black holes form.
"There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed," said Andy Goulding of Princeton University. Goulding is lead author of a Sept. 22 paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that reports the galaxy’s distance and mass, and co-author on the new Nature Astronomy paper.
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