Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI). Science: Steven Finkelstein (University of Texas at Austin), Rebecca Larson (University of Texas at Austin), Pablo Arrabal Haro (NOIRLab).
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 center 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 typically weigh more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun.