• iconNews
  • videos
  • entertainment
  • Home
  • News
    • UK News
    • US News
    • Australia
    • Ireland
    • World News
    • Weird News
    • Viral News
    • Sport
    • Technology
    • Science
    • True Crime
    • Travel
  • Entertainment
    • Celebrity
    • TV & Film
    • Netflix
    • Music
    • Gaming
    • TikTok
  • LAD Originals
    • Say Maaate to a Mate
    • Daily Ladness
    • Lad Files
    • UOKM8?
    • FreeToBe
    • Extinct
    • Citizen Reef
  • Advertise
  • Terms
  • Privacy & Cookies
  • LADbible Group
  • UNILAD
  • SPORTbible
  • GAMINGbible
  • Tyla
  • UNILAD Tech
  • FOODbible
  • License Our Content
  • About Us & Contact
  • Jobs
  • Latest
  • Topics A-Z
  • Authors
Facebook
Instagram
X
Threads
Snapchat
TikTok
YouTube

LAD Entertainment

YouTube

LAD Stories

Submit Your Content
Scientists find oldest ever black hole while trying to criticise distant galaxy

Home> News> Science

Updated 07:48 7 Nov 2023 GMTPublished 07:30 7 Nov 2023 GMT

Scientists find oldest ever black hole while trying to criticise distant galaxy

The new discovery could help understand how these black holes are formed

Jess Battison

Jess Battison

Scientists reckon they’ve found the oldest ever black hole yet.

NASA were using two of their space telescopes, Chandra and JWST, to criticise a distant galaxy (far, far away) when they made the mind-boggling discovery.

Before we go any further, let’s clarify what a black hole is – other than a crazy thing in space that many of us grew up thinking we were all going to get sucked into (it was a real fear, ok).

Advert

According to NASA, a black hole is a ‘great amount of matter packed into a very small area’ with a gravitational field so strong that ‘nothing, not even light, can escape’.

There are two varieties of the things: stellar-mass and supermassive.

Stellar-mass black holes are three to dozens of times the Sun’s mass and spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy.

Whereas the supermassive lads weigh 100,000 to billions of solar masses and are found in the centres of the big galaxies – including ours.

This newly discovered black hole is a supermassive whopper has roughly the same mass as all the stars in its galaxy combined.

Advert

This black hole is believed to be the oldest in the universe.
NASA/JWST/Chandra

As reported by The Washington Post, lead author of the new paper, Akos Bogdan, said this is ‘absolutely crazy’.

That’s certainly one way of putting it.

Thought to be the oldest one NASA have discovered yet, it was apparently formed 470 million years after the Big Bang.

Picked up in X-rays from the telescopes, scientists have estimated that the black hole is 13.2 billion years old.

Advert

They’ve worked this out as they reckon the universe began 13.7 billion years ago.

Discovered in a galaxy named UHZ1, the black hole is 10 times the size of the one in our Milky Way (which has a diameter of 14.6 million miles).

And the finding of this could also help in the debate of the origins of these supermassive black holes as theorists have two competing theories – light seed vs. heavy seed.

Illustration of a black hole.
Aaron Horowitz/Getty images

Light seed theory says a star will collapse into the stellar mass black hole and then grow over time until it reaches the status of supermassive.

Advert

But heavy seed theory says a whopper cloud of gas (instead of an individual star) does the collapsing – leading to the black hole forming at a supermassive scale.

Bogdan said: “In this case, we can say with certainty that the black hole came from a heavy seed, it is a pretty big deal.”

However, this is only evidence from one galaxy, so it can’t really resolve the whole debate on its own.

Either way, it’s a pretty huge, and pretty elderly, black hole to be discovered.

Featured Image Credit: NASA/JWST/Chandra

Topics: Science, Space

Jess Battison
Jess Battison

Jess is a Senior Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include asking everyone in the office what they're having for tea, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021.

X

@jessbattison_

Advert

Advert

Advert

Choose your content:

2 hours ago
3 hours ago
  • 2 hours ago

    Teenager buys three-bedroom house for £230,000 without financial help from parents

    Zack Kendrick, from Hamilton East, New Zealand, has revealed how he bought his first home at the age of 19

    News
  • 2 hours ago

    British man miraculously survives tragic Air India plane crash sat in seat 11A

    Police had previously said they did not expect to find survivors

    News

    breaking

  • 2 hours ago

    Simulation shows what happens when you eat superfood that left man with a blocked food pipe

    Chia seeds are considered one of nature's major superfoods for a reason

    News
  • 3 hours ago

    Everything known about UK-bound flight that crashed as Air India releases statement

    Air India flight AI171 was heading to London Gatwick but crashed shortly after take-off

    News
  • First ever ‘triple black hole’ discovered as scientists explain what it means
  • Chernobyl scientists discover black fungus feeding on deadly radiation in 'film plot waiting to happen'
  • Scientists make model of 'black hole bomb' that could release more energy than 'a trillion nukes'
  • Scientists find 'proof' that disproves famous story from the Bible