CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the earliest known merger of black holes.
These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. It’s the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, scientists reported Thursday.
One black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is thought to be similar in size but is buried in dense gas, which makes it harder to measure.
Until now, astronomers weren’t sure how supermassive black holes got so big.
The latest findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest that mergers are how black holes can grow so rapidly — “even at cosmic dawn,” said lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge.
