James Webb Space Telescope Discovery

Three Supermassive Black Hole Discoveries by JWST-CEERS

Researchers have identified the most distant active supermassive black hole to date in the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. The black hole, within galaxy CEERS 1019, existed just over 570 million years after the big bang and weighs only 9 million solar masses. For context, the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun, and other very distant supermassive black holes we’ve known about for decades weigh more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun. (CEERS 1019 may only hold this record for a few weeks – claims about other, more distant black holes identified by Webb are currently being carefully reviewed by the astronomical community.) Though small, CEERS 1019 is ravenous, consuming gas, dust, and stars at the highest theoretically possible rate for its size. Webb’s spectrum reflects it is fully focused on eating its “meal.” Ready to explore the data? Find the white peak just past 4.7 microns. It represents hydrogen. Webb’s data are fitted to two models, because more than one source is responsible for the data’s shape. The broad model at the bottom, represented in yellow, fits faster gas swirling in the black hole’s active accretion disk. The purple model with a high peak fits slower gas in the galaxy – this is emission from stars that are actively forming. The width of Webb’s oxygen detections, which are not shown on this chart, indicate that the stars in the surrounding galaxy have typical speeds for a massive galaxy. The team also confirmed additional detections of hydrogen, which were first found by researchers using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and was also identified in data from the W. M. Keck Observatory. Webb’s data are so clear that they were able to confirm the presence of the black hole. The data can also prove that the black hole is emitting a lot of light – and that gas is speeding around the black hole. This result is also exciting because of the additional discoveries that may soon be reported. “Detecting smaller active supermassive black holes at the early times in the universe may become a little bit more common than we expected with this telescope,” said Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, who led this discovery. Black hole existed 570 million years after Big Bang (NIRSpec MSA emission spectrum) Researchers using data and images from the James Webb Space Telescope have already captured two of the smallest known supermassive black holes in the early Universe. Webb’s spectra show that these black holes weigh only 10 million times the mass of the Sun. Other very distant supermassive black holes we’ve known about for decades are over 1 billion times the mass of the Sun. These two are so small that they are closer to the size of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, which is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun. Unmistakable signatures of the distances to their host galaxies are in each spectrum above: Three lines appear in the same order – one hydrogen line followed by two ionised oxygen lines. Where this pattern falls reveals the redshift of the two targets, showing researchers how long ago their light was emitted. The first spectrum proves black hole CEERS 2782 existed only 1.1 billion years after the big bang, emitting its light 12.7 billion years ago. Webb’s data also show it is clear of dust. The second, CEERS 746, existed slightly earlier, 1 billion years after the big bang, but its bright accretion disk is still partially clouded by dust. The researchers found this pair of extremely distant black holes while carefully reviewing images from the CEERS Survey – and followed up to learn their precise makeup with Webb’s microshutter array aboard NIRSpec (its Near-Infrared Spectrograph), which produced the definitive spectra above. Webb was immediately able to clearly detail some of the most distant black holes yet known, which has already opened a vast new region of research. These black holes existed toward the end of the Era of Reionization, when the universe was cast in a dense “fog.” With its infrared observations, Webb can capture plenty of light from objects that existed during this period, which is why researchers are so excited to continue reviewing the CEERS data. Two extremely distant active supermassive black holes (NIRSpec MSA emission spectra) This graphic shows detections of the most distant active supermassive black holes currently known in the universe. They were identified by a range of telescopes, both in space and on the ground. Three were recently identified in the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. The most distant black hole is CEERS 1019, which existed just over 570 million years after the big bang. CEERS 746 was detected 1 billion years after the big bang. Third place currently goes to CEERS 2782, which existed 1.1 billion years after the big bang. Knowing they existed is important, but more fully understanding their compositions may ultimately lead us to revise what we know about black holes that existed when the universe was very young. The new CEERS black holes are much smaller than any others researchers have detected. CEERS 1019 weighs only 9 million solar masses. Both CEERS 746 and CEERS 2782 are slightly larger, weighing in at 10 million times the mass of the Sun. All three are more similar to the mass of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, which is only 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun, than to other distant behemoths in the early universe we’ve known about previously, which tend to weigh over 1 billion times the mass of the Sun. The CEERS “light weights” may help completely reshape what we understand about how supermassive black holes formed and grew during the universe’s first billion years. This is critical because the universe was cast in a dense “fog” during this period, known as the Era of Reionization. How did these black holes form in the first place? After they formed, did these black holes help charge or ionise the gas particles, leading to more transparent conditions around their host galaxies? Researchers certainly need to identify and classify many more extremely distant black holes to begin answering these big questions. This might be as few as a dozen sources, if they all follow the same trend, or upward of 50. In the coming years, Webb’s highly detailed images and data will help astronomers build larger and larger samples of the masses of black holes across cosmic time, and begin to better model how they developed over billions of years. Active supermassive black holes across cosmic time