Discovery of the oldest case of the merger of supermassive black holes

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During its observation of the constellation (Sexon), the James Webb Space Telescope discovered the oldest example of the merger of supermassive black holes, which occurred only 740 million years after the Big Bang.

The European Space Agency (ESA) press service said: “During our observations of the ZS7 galaxy, we found evidence of unusually rapid gas movement in the vicinity of its central supermassive black hole, in addition to a pool of very hot, highly ionized gas. The high resolution of the telescope allowed us to understand this.” .

Hannah Opler, a researcher at the British University of Cambridge, said: “In the center of this celestial body there is not one black hole, but two black holes.”

Scientists made this discovery while studying a large number of so-called active galactic nuclei, which are active supermassive black holes, which were discovered in the early universe within the framework of the CANDELS project using the Hubble telescope. The researchers took advantage of the high accuracy and sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, as the ideological successor to Hubble, to obtain clearer images of these galaxies.

Images obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope indicated that in the center of one of these celestial bodies, the ZS7 galaxy, there is not a single body, but rather two combined bodies, rotating at the same time around each other at a very short distance, equivalent to about 2000 km. Light year. Scientists calculated their masses and came to the conclusion that they are both relatively small black holes, whose mass exceeds the mass of the sun by about 50 million times.

The researchers noted that these supermassive black holes should quickly approach each other and constantly produce gravitational waves due to the small distance between them. These temporal and spatial fluctuations can, in principle, be detected by the orbital gravitational observatory LISA, which the European Space Agency plans to launch into space in the second half of the 2030s.