Black hole existed 570 million years after Big Bang (NIRSpec MSA emission spectrum)

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.

Webb’s microshutter array aboard NIRSpec (its Near-Infrared Spectrograph) produced the highly detailed spectra above.

NIRSpec was built for the European Space Agency (ESA) by a consortium of European companies led by Airbus Defence and Space (ADS) with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre providing its detector and micro-shutter subsystems.

[Image description: The graphic shows the redshift of one active supermassive black hole. At top right is the complete NIRCam image of the field, which has an uneven white outline and is very small. To its left is a large pull out, labelled NIRCam imaging, which shows galaxies of different colours, shapes, and sizes across most of the top row. In the inset image is a larger blurry red dot with two green dots at its left and right. The bottom row shows data in white, a model in yellow labelled faster gas around the black hole, and a second model represented by a purple line that is labelled slower gas in the galaxy.]