CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the first known black hole merger.
These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the Big Bang that formed the universe. It’s the most distant detection of merging black holes ever, scientists reported Thursday.
A black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is thought to be similar in size, but is buried in dense gas, making it more difficult to measure.
Until now, astronomers weren’t sure how supermassive black holes got so big.
The latest findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest that mergers are how black holes can grow so quickly – “even at cosmic dawn”, said lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge.
“Huge black holes have shaped the evolution of galaxies since the beginning,” Ubler said in a statement.
Launched in 2021 as the eventual successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the largest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space. A joint US and European project, the infrared observatory examines the universe from a location 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
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