Three black holes in one young galaxy: a first for the James Webb telescope
A team led by astronomers in Garching has used the space telescope to find three active black holes in a single galaxy of the early universe for the first time. Two of them are likely to merge.
Symbolic image · Photo: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope from Greenbelt, MD, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped and resized)
A team led by Hannah Übler of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching has used the James Webb Space Telescope to discover three active, massive black holes in the galaxy J0148-4214. It lies more than 12.5 billion light-years away and is seen as it was about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. “This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant Universe,” Übler said.
The black holes weigh about 80 million, 2 million and 600,000 solar masses. The two at the centre are only about 620 light-years apart and are expected to merge within a few hundred million years; the third lies about 5,500 light-years from the centre. The smallest is feeding faster than the so-called Eddington limit allows under basic models.
The find was made possible by the telescope's NIRSpec spectrograph, which records spectra across an entire field of view. Without this technique, probably only one of the three would have been identified. The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Co-author Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge said it suggests mergers may be an additional, fast route for black hole growth in the early universe.