A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the RUBIES survey identified three mysterious objects in the early universe, about 600–800 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery today June 27 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team studied spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

The discovery is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist but have never found—intermediate-mass black holes formed in early stages of galaxy evolution.

Visible to the naked eye as a smudge in the night sky from Southern latitudes, Omega Centauri is a magnificent collection of 10 million stars. Viewed through a small telescope, it resembles other globular clusters —a densely packed spherical assembly of stars where the core is so congested that individual stars blur into one another.

However, recent research conducted by teams from the University of Utah and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has resolved a long-standing debate among astronomers by confirming that Omega Centauri harbors a central black hole. The black hole appears to be the missing link between its stellar and supermassive kin—stuck in an intermediate stage of evolution, it is considerably less massive than the colossal black holes that are typically found in the centers of galaxies. Omega Centauri seems to be the core of a small, separate galaxy whose evolution was cut short when it was swallowed by the Milky Way.

Researchers have confirmed the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the core of Omega Centauri, a cluster that once formed the heart of a separate galaxy. This finding enhances our understanding of black hole evolution and galaxy dynamics. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

Researchers confirmed an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri’s center, supporting theories of its origin as a distinct galaxy core merged with the Milky Way.

Newly identified fast-moving stars in the star cluster Omega Centauri provide solid evidence for a central black hole in the cluster. With at least 8,200 solar masses, it is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist: intermediate-mass black holes, formed in the early stages of galaxy evolution. The discovery bolsters the case for Omega Centauri as the core region of a galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago. Stripped of its outer stars, that galaxy nucleus has remained “frozen in time” since then. The study has been published in the journal Nature.