The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations could help to answer questions about how the celestial objects formed early in the Universe
. JWST’s unprecedented power has allowed it to discover a huge range of these objects — from many faint, distant black holes to a handful of bright ones raging even farther away.
“It’s truly studying parts of the Universe that just weren’t available to us technologically,” says Rebecca Larson, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. JWST’s black-hole studies are still in their early days, and astronomers caution that much remains to be resolved. But it’s already clear that its discoveries could help scientists to answer many long-standing queries about black holes, such as how they managed to form early in the history of the Universe and grow quickly into cosmic vacuums, sucking up everything around them.
Distance in the Universe can be measured by a quantity known as redshift; the higher an object’s redshift, the more distant it is and the earlier it appears in the Universe’s history. Many of JWST’s newfound black holes lie at redshifts of between 4 and 6, which corresponds to a time when the Universe was about 1 billion to 1.5 billion years old.
So far, JWST has discovered roughly ten times as many faint black holes at these intermediate redshifts than would be expected on the basis of the number of black holes previously known. Why that is “we don’t understand yet”, says Kohei Inayoshi, an astrophysicist at Peking University in Beijing.JWST has also found several of the most distant black holes ever seen.
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