Oldest Black Hole

A Little Red Dot might have a big black hole in its heart. And that’s a bit of a challenge to explain.

Little Red Dots are galaxies from the first 1.5 billion years of the universe. The name comes from their appearance – they’re small and red, but they’re especially bright. They don’t appear to have enough stars to make them so bright. So a good bit of their “shininess” could come from giant black holes that are devouring material around them. As they tumble inward, the hot gas, dust, and stars produce enormous amounts of energy.

Even so, the black hole in one Little Red Dot is a bit of a puzzler.

Led by astronomers at the University of Texas at Austin, a team looked at CAPERS-LRD-z9 with Webb Space Telescope. By measuring the speed of material orbiting the center of the galaxy, the team determined that the black hole is up to 300 million times the mass of the Sun.

And that’s where the challenge comes in. The galaxy is so far away that we see it as it looked when the universe was just 500 million years old – three percent of its current age. That makes the black hole the most-distant yet seen. But theories of how such monster black holes form say that half a billion years probably isn’t long enough to make one that big. So theorists have a lot of work to do to explain the giant black hole at the center of a Little Red Dot.

More about black holes tomorrow.

Script by Damond Benningfield