Quasar breaks record for most distant supermassive black hole

There is a new record holder for the most distant supermassive black hole. A newly spotted quasar – a black hole that gobbles up matter so quickly it becomes white hot – has been sending light for only 662 million years after the Big Bang, astronomers report July 6 at Astronomy and astrophysics. THE former record holderdiscovered in 2021, dates from 15 million years later.

The discovery ratchets up the tension on a long-standing mystery of how the first black holes got so big so fastexplains astronomer Daming Yang of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Every step back in time makes this question even more difficult to explain. »

The new champion was spotted by the European Space Agency Euclid Space Telescopewhich embarked on a six-year mission in 2024 to map about a third of the sky in infrared wavelengths of light.

These wavelengths are crucial for finding distant objects, because light stretches or redshifts as it passes through the expanding cosmos. If a quasar emits visible light in the early universe, it will appear in infrared when it reaches our telescopes.

Before Euclid, telescopes could only detect the brightest quasars until about 770 million years after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. Until now, astronomers only knew of nine quasars before this. During its first 18 months, Euclid found 12 more, Yang and colleagues report.

“This moves the field from studying a few outliers to studying the first massive black holes as a population,” says Yang. “It’s just as important as breaking a record.”

The new record holder, named EUCL J1729, is not alone. Quasars ranked second and third in terms of distance were also part of this harvest. They are much fainter than other quasars spotted at similar distances, probably because the brighter ones are easier to see. Finding fainter quasars to study will help reveal what most quasars from that era actually looked like.

The next steps will be to follow up with the James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories to learn more about quasar masses and environments. Beyond that, “research will continue,” Yang said. Euclid could spot the first quasars 645 million years after the Big Bang – perhaps as soon as this year.