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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted two biggest pair of black holes colliding into each other some 13 billion light years away from Earth. These giant black holes have been estimated to be as massive as 50 million suns each.
The merging cosmic monsters are neither the biggest nor the oldest black holes ever discovered, but they are still very bafflingly big for such an early time in the universe’s history, notes the European Space Agency (ESA) in an official statement.
The black holes are not just surprisingly huge but also challenge leading theories in the field of cosmology, which fail to explain how objects in the universe could grow so large at such a fast pace.
"Our findings suggest that merging is an important route through which black holes can rapidly grow, even at cosmic dawn," the study’s lead author Hannah Übler, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, said in the statement.
"Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant Universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning."
Monster duo of black holes detected merging into each other
Generally, the most active black holes reach supermassive status by bulking up to a few hundred thousand to several billion times the mass of the sun. One key way that supermassive black holes may reach such humungous sizes is by merging with other large black holes in nearby galaxies — a phenomenon that's been detected at various times and places throughout the universe.
The new discovery came to light with JWST's powerful NIRCam infrared instrument, which can detect the light of ancient objects across vast cosmic distances and through obscuring clouds of dust.
The findings of the study were published Thursday (May 16) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In the official paper, the researchers said they trained the JWST's infrared cameras on a known black hole system called ZS7, located in an early epoch of the universe known as cosmic dawn.
Detailed observations with JWST revealed the motion of a dense cloud of gas around the black hole, suggesting it was actively growing. It also detected the approximate location of a second black hole located very close by, likely in the process of merging with the first.
"Thanks to the unprecedented sharpness of its imaging capabilities, Webb also allowed our team to spatially separate the two black holes," Übler said.
The team pegged one of the black holes at about t 50 million solar masses and the second black hole, which is "buried" in the dense cloud of gas, likely has a similar mass to its neighbour, but the researchers couldn't get a clear enough view of its radiation to say for sure.
(With inputs from agencies)
