James Webb Space Telescope Detects Most Distant Dormant Black Hole Ever Found

Astronomers kinda pulled off a cosmic first, basically “weighing” a dozing black hole more than 10 billion light-years away from Earth. With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they spotted a sleeping black hole sitting at the center of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138, and that makes it the most distant dormant black hole anyone’s ever found. It’s about 15 times farther than the earlier record, too. The object tips the scales at around six billion Suns’ worth of mass, which is wild, and we’re seeing it when the universe was only roughly three billion years old.

What the Science Paper Reveals

Led by Andrew Newman of Carnegie Science and published in Science, a new study reveals that dormant black holes are basically invisible because they don’t spew radiation as their active counterparts do. Using the JWST’s infrared spectrograph, the team measured the black hole’s mass by checking how its gravity influences nearby stars. The cool part is that they applied a method previously limited to use in our galactic backyard only. Plus, a neat cosmic coincidence occurred; a foreground galaxy cluster acted as a magnifying glass, enlarging MRG-M0138 to about 30 times its normal size.

Why It Matters

Nearby galaxies have shown strong connections between black hole mass and the properties of surrounding stars. Testing if this relationship existed billions of years ago, though, has been tough. So, this discovery really nails it. MRG-M0138 was likely a bright quasar that pushed out star-forming gas, stopping new stars from forming. With the Euclid satellite and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we’re set for even more findings. These will help us understand how galaxies and their black holes developed side by side.