Active Supermassive Black Holes Across Cosmic Time

This graphic shows detections of the most distant active supermassive black holes currently known in the universe. They were identified by a range of telescopes, both in space and on the ground. Three were recently identified by in the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey.

The most distant black hole is CEERS 1019, which existed just over 570 million years after the big bang. CEERS 746 was detected 1 billion years after the big bang. Third place currently goes to CEERS 2782, which existed 1.1 billion years after the big bang.

Knowing they existed is important, but more fully understanding their compositions may ultimately lead us to revise what we know about black holes that existed when the universe was very young. The new CEERS black holes are much smaller than any others researchers have detected. CEERS 1019 weighs only 9 million solar masses. Both CEERS 746 and CEERS 2782 are slightly larger, weighing in at 10 million times the mass of the Sun. All three are more similar to the mass of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, which is only 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun, than to other distant behemoths in the early universe we’ve known about previously, which tend to weigh over 1 billion times the mass of the Sun.

The CEERS “light weights” may help completely reshape what we understand about how supermassive black holes formed and grew during the universe’s first billion years. This is critical because the universe was cast in a dense “fog” during this period, known as the Era of Reionization. How did these black holes form in the first place? After they formed, did these black holes help charge or ionize the gas particles, leading to more transparent conditions around their host galaxies?

Researchers certainly need to identify and classify many more extremely distant black holes to begin answering these big questions. This might be as few as a dozen sources, if they all follow the same trend, or upward of 50. In the coming years, Webb’s highly detailed images and data will help astronomers build larger and larger samples of the masses of black hole across cosmic time, and begin to better model how they developed over billions of years. “The more black holes we find, and the earlier we find them, the easier it will be able to put constraints on how they formed and evolved over billions of years,” explained Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin, who leads the CEERS Survey.