James webb space telescope at its1/23/2024 ![]() These galaxies are rapidly forming stars, but are not yet as chemically enriched as galaxies that are much closer to home. “I am overwhelmed by the amount of highly detailed spectra of remote galaxies Webb returned,” Arrabal Haro said. Researchers theorized that Webb would detect fewer galaxies than are being found at these distances. Not only are they extremely distant, the fact that so many bright galaxies were detected is notable. Team members Pablo Arrabal Haro of NSF’s NOIRLab and Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Texas at Austin identified 11 galaxies that existed 470 to 675 million years after the big bang. Webb’s sensitive spectra also allowed these researchers to measure precise distances to, and therefore the ages of, galaxies in the early universe. “With other telescopes, these targets look like ordinary star-forming galaxies, not active supermassive black holes,” Finkelstein added. “Now we think that lower mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered.” Before Webb, all three black holes were too faint to be detected. Webb is the first observatory that can capture them so clearly,” Kocevski added. “Researchers have long known that there must be lower mass black holes in the early universe. They are only about 10 million times the mass of the Sun. Like the one in CEERS 1019, these two black holes are also “light weights” – at least when compared to previously known supermassive black holes at these distances. “The central black hole is visible, but the presence of dust suggests it might lie within a galaxy that is also furiously pumping out stars,” Kocevski explained. Its bright accretion disk, a ring made up of gas and dust that encircles its supermassive black hole, is still partially clouded by dust. The second black hole, in galaxy CEERS 746, existed slightly earlier, 1 billion years after the big bang. There isn’t any dust obscuring Webb’s view of it, so researchers could immediately determine when its black hole existed in the history of the universe – only 1.1 billion years after the big bang. The first, within galaxy CEERS 2782, was easiest to pick out. Team member Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and the team quickly spotted another pair of small black holes in the data. The CEERS Survey is expansive, and there is a lot more to explore. More Extremely Distant Black Holes, Galaxies Hit the Scene “A galaxy merger could be partly responsible for fueling the activity in this galaxy’s black hole, and that could also lead to increased star formation.” “We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances,” said CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Visually, CEERS 1019 appears as three bright clumps, not a single circular disk. They turned to the images to explore why that might be. The team found this galaxy is ingesting as much gas as it can while also churning out new stars. “There are so many spectral lines to analyze!” Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy’s star-formation rate. “Looking at this distant object with this telescope is a lot like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies near our own,” said Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, who led this discovery. Webb’s data is practically overflowing with precise information that makes these confirmations so easy to pull out of the data. (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.) Researchers have long known that smaller black holes must have existed earlier in the universe, but it wasn’t until Webb began observing that they were able to make definitive detections. Though smaller, this black hole existed so much earlier that it is still difficult to explain how it formed so soon after the universe began. This black hole is also not as bright as the more massive behemoths previously detected. (They are actively “eating” matter, which lights up as it swirls toward the black hole.) The black hole within CEERS 1019 is more similar to the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, which is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun. Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun – and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter. This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses, far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes. CEERS 1019 is not only notable for how long ago it existed, but also how relatively little its black hole weighs.
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