Yet another SURPRISE!

[BeAChooser]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... stract.com

Astronomers have detected the oldest black hole ever observed, dating back more than 13bn years to the dawn of the universe.

The observations, by the James Webb space telescope (JWST), reveal it to be at the heart of a galaxy 440m years after the big bang. At around a million times the mass of the sun, it is surprisingly big for a baby black hole, raising the question of how it grew so big so quickly.

Prof Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, who led the observations, said: “The surprise is in it being so very massive. That was the most unexpected thing.”

… snip … Until recently, they were assumed to have simply snowballed over nearly 14bn years, steadily growing through mergers and by gobbling up stars and other objects. But this snowball scenario cannot fully account for the epic proportions of present-day supermassive black holes.

“Understanding where the black holes came from in the first place has always been a puzzle, but now that puzzle seems to be deepening,” said Prof Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London, who was not involved in the research. “These results, using the power of JWST to peer back through time, suggest that some black holes instead grew at a tremendous rate in the young universe, far faster than we expected.”

Note that the preprinted science paper announcing this discovery (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.12492.pdf) (with over 40 authors!) states “Black holes with masses in excess of several billion solar masses have been found at redshifts 6-7.5, when the universe was less than 1 Gyr old. The existence of such supermassive black holes already in place at such early epochs has been challenging for theoretical models and distinguishing between different scenarios has prompted the search for their progenitors at earlier epochs.” So it’s kind of surprising that finding a black hole right after the Big Bang is "unexpected . In any case, all they’d done is kick the can even further into to past ... and they still have a problem explaining what they see.