Astronomers discover supermassive black hole at the heart of ancient galaxy

A supermassive black hole was found by astronomers at the heart of an ancient galaxy which is five times bigger than the expected size, on the basis of the number of stars it contains.

The immense black hole was spotted by researchers in a galaxy called GS-9209, which lies 25 billion light-years away from Earth, making it one of the farthest to have been discovered and recorded.

The team of astronomers at Edinburgh University, with the use of the James Webb space telescope (JWST), observed the galaxy and revealed fresh information about its history and composition.

Dr Adam Carnall, who headed the team, said that the telescope, which is the most powerful ever built, helped them see how galaxies were growing more “larger and earlier” than what astronomers expected in the universe's first billion years.

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“This work gives us our first really detailed look at the properties of these early galaxies, charting in detail the history of GS-9209, which managed to form as many stars as our own Milky Way in just 800mn years after the big bang,” he stated.

Carnall added the “very massive black hole” spotted at the centre of GS-9209 was a “big surprise” that appeared to be supporting the theory that such enormous black holes stopped the formation of stars in early galaxies.

“The evidence we see for the supermassive black hole was really unexpected,” Carnall said. “This is the kind of detail we’d never have been able to see without JWST,” he added.

GS-9209 galaxy isone-tenth of Milky Way in size

Edinburgh's former PhD student and now a professor of observational cosmology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Karina Caputi, had discovered the GS-9209 galaxy in 2004.

While GS-9209 contains around as many stars as are present in our home galaxy along with a combined mass which is equivalent to 40 billion suns, the galaxy's size is only one-tenth of the Milky Way.

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The galaxy is one of the earliest known examples of the ones that have stopped forming stars, stated the researchers.

“The fact (that the black hole) is so massive, means it must have been very active in the past, with lots of gas falling in, which would have shone extremely brightly as a quasar,” said Carnall said. “All that energy spewing out from the black hole in the centre of the galaxy would have seriously disrupted the whole galaxy, stopping gas from collapsing to form new stars,” he added.

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