NASA’s Hubble finds more black holes than expected in the early universe

With the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of researchers led by scientists in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University has found more black holes in the early universe than has previously been reported. The new result can help scientists understand how supermassive black holes were created.

Available position: Research assistant in Astronomy

Star clusters observed within a galaxy in the early Universe for the first time

Understanding how stars and galaxies formed and evolved is one of astrophysics' biggest challenges. A new study led by Dr. Angela Adamo at Stockholm University offers fresh insights. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers studied the galaxy Cosmic Gems arc (SPT0615-JD), whose light was emitted 460 million years after the big bang. This galaxy, magnified by gravitational lensing, revealed five young massive star clusters. “The surprise and astonishment was incredible when we opened the JWST images for the first time” says Adamo.

The most distant quasar observed using the JWST

Using the space telescope JWST, astronomers have examined one of the most distant known black holes in the universe. Their observations provide a glimpse of the growth of black holes in the early universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Surprisingly, the early black hole in question seems to be “feeding” in much the same manner as its more recent kin. Astronomers have been struggling for a while now to explain how the earliest black holes gained their considerable masses. The new results all but rule out unusually efficient feeding mechanisms at early times as a possible solution. The results have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.