'It is still difficult to explain how it formed so soon after the universe began.'
"Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical," said Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who leads the CEERS Survey and co-authoredthat used JWST's data."With Webb, not only can we see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, we can now start to accurately measure them. That's the tremendous power of this telescope.
This graphic shows detections of the most distant active supermassive black holes currently known in the universe. 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.
Spectral data of CEERS 1019 collected by JWST. The white peak just past 4.7 microns 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.
These two black holes, at the cores of the galaxies CEERS 2782 and CEERS 746, formed 1.1 billion years and 1 billion years after the Big Bang, respectively. Each weighs in at around 10 million solar masses.
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James Webb telescope detects the earliest strand in the 'cosmic web' ever seenJoanna Thompson is a science journalist and runner based in New York. She holds a B.S. in Zoology and a B.A. in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, as well as a Master's in Science Journalism from NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Find more of her work in Scientific American, The Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura or Audubon Magazine.
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