James Webb telescope discovered three Supermassive black holes from an ancient galaxy

Image Credit: AI generated Light from a distant galaxy has travelled for more than 12.5 billion years to reach Earth, allowing astronomers to see the universe when it was only about 1.2 billion years old. At that remarkable stage in cosmic history, the galaxy was already home to ‘three actively feeding supermassive black holes.’ An international team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics identified the three objects using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. Two of the black holes are located close together near the centre of the galaxy, while a third lies farther out. According to the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the finding provides a rare look at how black holes could grow and interact in the young Universe, when galaxies themselves were still taking shape.Finding three black holes from an ancient galaxyThe discovery became possible because of the James Webb Space Telescope's ability to separate light from different parts of a distant galaxy. The researchers used Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, in its integral-field spectroscopy mode. Rather than simply taking an ordinary picture, the instrumen...