Ancient Black Hole Discovery Defies Cosmic Timeline in New Webb Data
Astronomers, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, have made a groundbreaking discovery that could completely rewrite our understanding of cosmic history: a supermassive black hole that existed before the stars of its host galaxy even formed.
For decades, the cosmic "chicken-and-egg" dilemma swung toward galaxies coming first, which essentially dictates that massive stars within a young galaxy would burn through their fuel, collapse into stellar-mass black holes, and gradually merge and feast on surrounding matter to grow into supermassive giants over billions of years. However, this theory doesn't explain how certain black holes millions (or even billions) of times the mass of the Sun managed to exist within the first billion years of the universe.
Webb’s latest target, a prototypical Little Red Dot galaxy named Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1), could provide a clearer answer. Located so far away that its light has taken 13 billion years to get...
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