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The James Webb Space Telescope has made history by discovering the earliest black hole known in the Universe. This infrared observatory found a massive black hole that existed when the Universe was only 470 million years old, roughly 3% of its current age. The discovery became even more intriguing when scientists measured the black hole's mass, which turned out to be 40 million times that of our Sun. This is ten times the mass of Sagittarius A* (A star), the supermassive black hole located at the center of our galaxy. This finding appears to have resolved one of the most significant mysteries in astronomy: the origin of the first black holes in the Universe.

But how did such a massive black hole form so quickly in the baby universe? What's so puzzling about the mass of this supermassive black hole lying at the edge of time? Finally, and most importantly, how does this discovery shed light on the birth of the first black holes in the cosmos?

The 79th episode of the Sunday Discovery Series answers all these questions.

RESEARCH PAPER:
Evidence for heavy seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z~10 X-ray quasar, Bogdan et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458


Created By: Rishabh Nakra
Written By: Shreejaya Karantha
Narrated By: Jeffrey Smith