The cutting-edge Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant black hole merger yet, which occurred when the universe was just 740 million years old. It’s the first time astronomers have seen a merger so early in the universe’s history, making it a record breaker. Black holes are massive objects peppered throughout our universe; their gravitational fields are so strong that not even light can escape their event horizons.
” Webb’s vision is so sharp that the team was able to spatially separate the two black holes, revealing some of their physical characteristics. One of the holes is about 50 million times the mass of the Sun, while the other is obscured in a dense cloud of gas. The team’s full paper on the discovery was published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.