A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Now with some news about the history of the universe. Five hundred million years after the Big Bang, a flash in astronomical time, a supermassive object took shape.
ANTHONY TAYLOR: This being the earliest confirmed black hole, this object is a fantastic test case for seeing how black holes evolved in the very, very early universe.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Anthony Taylor leads a research team at the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin. That team is credited with identifying the oldest known supermassive black hole, about 300 million times the mass of our sun.
TAYLOR: Black holes tend to start small, and then they grow by consuming matter around them. However, this black hole is already massive, but it only had 500 million years to grow. So this starts putting stress on some of our models of how black holes form and how they grow.
MARTÍNEZ: This supermassive black hole lives in a galaxy far, far away. It's in a new class of galaxies that appear as fuzzy red splotches in the high-resolution images of the distant universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. They're known as the little red dots.
TAYLOR: When the little red dots were first discovered, there was a lot of intense debate initially as to, what were these things? Were they galaxies with a bunch of old stars in them? Were they primarily active-black-hole-driven?
MARTIN: Taylor and his team analyzed the light emitted from these little red dots, confirming in fact that they were looking at a very old black hole.
TAYLOR: So it's again pushing the boundary on where we start to see these objects.
MARTIN: And perhaps providing some insight into life's bigger questions.
TAYLOR: Getting these test cases in the early universe gives us hints as to how our own galaxy and how its black hole might have evolved - trying to look back and answer that question of, it's a huge universe, but how did we get here?
MARTÍNEZ: Taylor and his team's findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal of Letters. I'm sure the read time on that is just a few minutes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SOUNDGARDEN SONG, "BLACK HOLE SUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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