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The oldest black hole ever has been discovered, and it travels at a very high speed, trailing a large number of stars. The James Webb Space Telescope has managed to identify what today appears to be the oldest black hole ever observed by man.
The discovery is important because it could reveal some mysteries about the birth of supermassive black holes. Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues have identified a black hole that formed when the universe was only 570 million years old.
Its mass is 10 million times that of the Sun, making it a black hole of intermediate size. To identify the black hole, the researchers pointed their telescope at a galaxy, called CEERS_1019, which the Hubble Space Telescope had previously identified as the brightest known galaxy in a very distant region of the Universe.
But Hubble hadn't been able to see what was in his heart. This further mission was entrusted to the Webb Telescope and was fully successful. Larson said: "This is uncharted territory that is very important to understanding how black holes formed in the early Universe, and this discovery will fill in some of the gaps in the birth of the most mysterious objects in the Universe." Many galaxies have supermassive black holes inside them, but it's not clear how these black holes got so big.
They could have formed from small black holes, born from the collapse of the first stars, which have aggregated over time. Or they could have formed from huge amounts of primordial gas that directly collapsed into black holes without ever becoming a star.
The black hole is the result of implosions of sufficiently large masses. Gravity dominates over any other force, causing a gravitational collapse that tends to concentrate spacetime in a point at the center of the region, where a state of matter of curvature tending to infinity and volume tending to zero called singularity is theorized, with unknown characteristics and extraneous to the laws of general relativity.
The limit of the black hole is defined as the event horizon, a region that delimits its observable boundaries in a peculiar way. Due to the above properties, the black hole is not directly observable. Its presence is revealed only indirectly through its effects on the surrounding space: the gravitational interactions with other celestial bodies and their emissions, the mainly electromagnetic radiations of the matter captured by its force field.
