Astronomers have identified a fast developing black hole in the early cosmos that is thought to be a vital “missing link” between star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes using Hubble Space Telescope data, according to NASA.
According to NASA, the black hole, dubbed GNz7q and described as a “monster,” had gone unreported in one of the best-studied sections of the night sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North field.
NASA claims that archival Hubble data assisted the team in determining that GNz7q is a newly formed black hole that existed 750 million years after the big bang.
Hubble observed a compact source of ultraviolet (UV) and infrared light, which is compatible with the radiation expected from objects falling onto a black hole, according to the scientists.
Theories and computer simulations anticipated rapidly expanding black holes in dusty, early star-forming galaxies, but they had not been observed until recently, according to the report.
The astronomers believe the black hole may be able to shed light on a long-standing astronomical mystery: how did supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, grow to be so large so quickly?
The team now plans to use high-resolution surveys and the James Webb Space Telescope to look for comparable objects to see how frequent fast-growing black holes are.
