Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole ever observed using X-rays, thanks to NASA telescopes, the US space agency said on Monday, Xinhua news agency quoted Agerpres as saying.

The black hole is at an early stage of development, not previously observed, where its mass is similar to the mass of the main galaxy.

By combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope, launched nearly two years ago, a team of scientists was able to identify the signature of a black hole that formed only 470 million years after the Big Bang.

This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed, according to nasa.gov.

“We needed Webb to find this extremely distant galaxy and Chandra to discover its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bohdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, in how these results are described.

“We also took advantage of the cosmic magnifier, which amplified the amount of light we detected,” he explained. This magnification effect is known as gravitational lensing.

The black hole is more than 3 billion light-years away from Earth

The research team discovered a black hole in a galaxy called UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. However, according to data from the James Webb Telescope, the galaxy is much further away than that group, 13.2 billion light-years from Earth when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age, according to NASA.

Then two weeks of Chandra observations revealed the presence of clear signs of a growing supermassive black hole in this galaxy.

This discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses shortly after the Big Bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive gas clouds, forming black holes weighing between 10,000 and 100,000 suns?

Do they come from the explosions of the first stars that created black holes with masses of only 10 to 100 suns?

“There are physical limits to how fast black holes can grow after they are formed, but those born more massive have an advantage. It’s like planting a seedling that takes less time to grow into a full-sized tree than if you started with just a seed,” said Andy Goulding of Princeton University, co-author of the study. Quoted on the NASA website.

Theoretical physicists predicted the existence of such black holes

A team led by Akos Bohdan found strong evidence that the recently discovered black hole was born massive. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 100 million suns, based on its luminosity and X-ray energy.

This mass range is similar to that of all stars in the host galaxy, in stark contrast to the black holes at the centers of galaxies in the nearby Universe, which typically contain only one-tenth the mass of the host galaxy’s stars.

The significant mass of the black hole at a young age, the amount of X-rays it produces, and the luminosity of the galaxy found by Webb are consistent with theoretical predictions made in 2017 by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University that the “supermassive black hole” formed directly from the collapse of a huge clouds of gas.

“We believe this is the first detection of a very large black hole and the best evidence yet that some black holes form from massive gas clouds,” Natarajan said.

“For the first time, we observe a brief phase in which a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy before falling behind,” she added.

The researchers plan to use these findings and other results from the James Webb and other telescopes to complete a larger picture of the early universe.