Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever seen. The enormous object, hosted by the galaxy GHZ2, is so far away that astronomers see it as it was just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
The team's research, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv Nov. 4 but not yet peer-reviewed, used observations from JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph and Mid-Infrared Instrument. These instruments cover a wide range of wavelengths and can detect ultraviolet and optical light originally emitted by the distant galaxy, which has been stretched into the infrared due to the expansion of the universe.
