The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and “weighed” by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.
The black hole’s mass is about 6 billion times that of the sun, and is being observed at a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, about a quarter of its current age, offering unprecedented details into black holes in the early universe.
To find this, the team used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to track the motion of stars orbiting around the otherwise invisible black hole to measure its mass. Though the technique—known as stellar dynamics —has been used to measure dormant black holes in galaxies much closer to Earth, this is the first time it has been used to weigh one located such a great (cosmological) distance away.
The JWST continues to push the boundaries of what we thought possible in observational astronomy. Weighing a dormant black hole at 10 billion light-years is a remarkable technical achievement. Image processing and enhancement techniques have become critical in extracting meaningful data from these deep-space observations. AI-assisted image analysis is transforming how astronomers interpret cosmic data from instruments like JWST.