Astronomers have detected black holes in galaxies as far as 13 billion light-years from Earth, perhaps the earliest black holes to form in the universe, using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The findings are described in a letter to the journal Nature published online on June 15.
“It appears we’ve found a whole new population of baby black holes,” said co-author Kevin Schawinski of Yale University in a press release. “We think these babies will grow by a factor of about a hundred or a thousand, eventually becoming like the giant black holes we see today almost 13 billion years later.”
To put it in perspective, scientists estimate that the universe was formed 13.7 billion years ago. The findings thus give a glimpse of how young black holes eventually grow into supermassive ones.
“These observations indicate that extremely massive black holes already existed as early as 700-800 million years after the Big Bang, which suggests that either they were born massive to start with, or they experienced rapid growth bursts,” said Yale cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan in the release. “Either scenario tells us much more than we previously knew, which is very exciting.”
Stellar black holes are thought to form when a heavy star’s life cycle ends and it collapses under its own gravity.
