James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

The most distant black hole known to humanity

GN-z11 is an extremely distant, ancient galaxy existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang, which means we see it as it was 13.4 billion years ago. It's very luminous, which is pretty obvious due to the fact we can see it from such great, unimaginably distance. In order to determine distances in cosmic scales, astronomers measure the redshift of the object. Basically, since the universe is expanding, the light that travels from point A to B gets stretched, in case the distance of these two points gets larger and larger. For a few years GN-z11 was considered to be the most distant galaxy ever discovered, using Hubble observations. The redshift of this galaxy was determined to be z=11, but after James Webb was launched it revealed the actual redshift is 10.6, which as mentioned, translated to 13.4 billion light years away from us. This galaxy is located in a deep universe area called GOODS-North, and therefore its name: GN-z11 means GoodsNorth-z=11. Webb, btw, found much more distant galaxies since then. In a series of observations using JWST, a research group was able to determine this galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole, with a "surprising" mass of ~1.6 million times the mass of our sun. It may not sounds like much, since even the black hole in the center of our own galaxy has a mass of 4 million suns, but we need to remember we see GN-z11 shortly after the Big Bang. According to Kavli Institute for Comsology, University of Cambridge, a black hole with that mass that existed so early in the universe "challenges our assumptions about how black holes form and grow". In addition, the group also found that this black hole is accreting mass and has an outflow with velocity of 800-1000kms, likely driven by an active galactic nuclei. According to the group, the black hole is "accreting at about 5 times the Eddington rate. These properties are consistent with both heavy seeds scenarios, or scenarios envisaging intermediate/light seeds experiencing episodic super-Eddington phases. Our finding naturally explains the high luminosity of GN-z11 and can also provide an explanation for its exceptionally high nitrogen abundance". The previous record holder for the most distant black hole was CEERS 1019 which existed just over 570 million years after the Big Bang, also discovered by JWST. To me It's amazing that 200 years ago we barely knew how to use electricity, and today we observe black holes at the edge of the universe.