A groundbreaking discovery has been made by the Webb Space Telescope, which detected the earliest known merger of black holes. These two massive black holes and their galaxies were found to have merged just 740 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe. This discovery represents the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, as reported by scientists on Thursday.
One of the black holes identified in the merger is 50 million times more massive than our sun, while the other is believed to be of a similar size but is hidden in dense gas, making it harder to measure. Prior to this discovery, astronomers were uncertain about how supermassive black holes grew to such enormous sizes. The new findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest that mergers play a significant role in the rapid growth of black holes, even during the early stages of the universe’s formation.
Lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge stated that “Massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning.” The Webb Space Telescope is a joint U.S.-European project launched in 2021 as a successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. It observes
