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According to a study published in the journal Nature, the black hole was swallowing up its host galaxy just 430 million years after the universe’s origin, during a time known as the cosmic dawn.

Paris, France – The James Webb space telescope has discovered the oldest black hole yet identified, which was thriving so soon after the Big Bang that it defies our understanding of how these celestial behemoths emerge, astronomers announced Wednesday.

According to a study published in the journal Nature, the black hole was swallowing up its host galaxy just 430 million years after the universe’s origin, during a time known as the cosmic dawn.

According to study co-author and Cambridge University astronomer Jan Scholtz, this makes it 200 million years older than any other big black hole recorded.

Its mass, however, is 1.6 million times that of our Sun.

Exactly how it had time to grow that enormous so quickly after the enormous Bang 13.8 billion years ago would provide fresh knowledge “for the next generation of theoretical models” aimed at explaining what causes black holes, according to Scholtz.

It is invisible, as are all black holes, and can only be discovered by the massive blasts of light produced when it consumes whatever matter is unlucky enough to be nearby.

In 2016, the Hubble Space Telescope detected its host galaxy GN-z11, which is located in the Ursa Major constellation.

At the time, GN-z11 was the oldest (and hence most distant) galaxy ever detected. However, Hubble failed to detect the black hole at its center.

In 2022, Webb surpassed Hubble as the most powerful space observatory, releasing a flood of discoveries that scientists are scrambling to keep up.

Not only has it identified the black hole at the heart of GN-z11, but it has also discovered galaxies much further back in time and space, which are also bigger than had been thought feasible.

The black hole was energetically devouring GN-z11 during the cosmic dawn, which occurred just after the universe’s “dark ages,” when stars and galaxies were newly formed.

Supermassive black holes lurking at the center of galaxies often emerge over hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years.

So, how has this one grown so quickly?

Co-author Stephane Charlot, an astronomer at France’s Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, proposed that black holes in the early cosmos evolved differently than those closer to us.

One possibility is that they were born enormous as a result of the explosion of particularly massive stars that existed only in the early universe, he told AFP.

Alternatively, they could have been formed by “direct collapse of a dense gas cloud, without going through the star formation phase,” he noted.

Once formed, the black hole would have been able to gorge itself on the abundant gas around, resulting in an enormous growth spurt.

Scholtz emphasized that what has been revealed so far regarding GN-z11’s black hole “doesn’t rule out any of these scenarios”.

And this could be just the beginning.

Scholtz expects that Webb and other upcoming observatories, such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid, may find more of these black holes in the universe’s early glimmers.