Astronomers have used Hubble Space Telescope data to identify a rapidly growing black hole in the early universe that is considered a critical “missing link” between star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes, according to NASA.
Until now, the black hole, described as a ‘monster’ and nicknamed GNz7q, had gone unnoticed in one of the best-studied areas of the night sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North field, according to NASA.
Archival Hubble data from the telescope helped the team determine that GNz7q is a newly formed black hole that existed 750 million years after the big bang, NASA reports.
The team discovered that Hubble found a compact source of ultraviolet (UV) and infrared light consistent with the radiation expected from materials falling onto a black hole.
Rapidly growing black holes in dusty, early star-forming galaxies are predicted by theories and computer simulations, but had not been observed until now, according to the report.
The astronomers believe the black hole could help answer a longtime mystery in astronomy: How did supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, get to be so huge so fast?
The team now hopes to search for similar objects using high-resolution surveys and the James Webb Space Telescope to determine how common the fast-growing black holes really are.
Here’s more on the astronomers’ theories from NASA. This is a developing story.
