The colors in the new image, released Thursday, are used to indicate distance.
Windhorst is the principal investigator of the PEARLS, or Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science, program that conducted the Webb observations. “We are building on Hubble’s legacy by pushing to greater distances and fainter objects,” said Rogier Windhorst, regents professor in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a statement. Given the distance between Earth and the objects from the early days of the universe, when telescopes such as Webb observe this light, it’s effectively like looking into the past. Telescopes spot the oldest and most distant black hole formed after the big bangĪ light-year, equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles, is how far a beam of light travels in a year. NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán/L. These images show the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 that UHZ1 is located behind, in X-rays from Chandra and infrared data from Webb, as well as close-ups of the black hole host galaxy UHZ1. This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.
X-ray emission is a telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole. Astronomers found the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays (in a galaxy dubbed UHZ1) using the Chandra and Webb space telescopes.
