Black Hole Is Most Distant Ever Found

June 7, 2007 — An ongoing survey of the heavens has spotted the most distant, and therefore earliest, giant black hole in the universe.

The object, called a quasar and given the catchy name CFHQS J2329-0301, was found with three other extremely distant quasars in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey, which uses an imaging instrument called the MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

"This is indeed the most distant," said Christian Veillet, director of the CFHT. But he wouldn't be surprised, he said, if something even more remote turns up soon. "They are really in the middle of the survey, so there are more to come."

The previously most distant quasar was sighted by astronomers doing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"That is an exciting discovery indeed!" said Sloan Survey and Princeton University astronomer Michael Strauss. "We knew that our record would have to be broken eventually."

The team's discovery was presented on June 7 by University of Ottawa astronomer Chris Willott at the meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) in Kingston, Ontario.

The distance of CFHQS J2329-0301 is about 13 billion light-years, say the scientists. That figure comes from splitting the quasar's light into a rainbow of colors and seeing how far to the red side of the spectrum some telltale lines have shifted. The greater the red-shift, the greater the distance.

As for how there can be any light from a black hole about 500 million times the mass of the sun, it comes from the superheated material that's falling into it.

Because the light from the quasar has traveled 13 billion years to reach Earth, it offers two interesting avenues of study for researchers. On the one hand, the light suggests something about the nature of the very earliest galaxies, which are generally required to build such gigantic black holes.

The problem is, 13 billion years ago is just 700 million years after the Big Bang. That's generally thought to be a time before galaxies were constructed, according to one of the discovery team members, John Hutchings of the National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.

It could be that galaxies formed earlier than expected or something else entirely is going on. It's a puzzle, says Hutchings.

On the other hand, the quasars also serve as backlights that have been filtered by vast amounts of space and time before their light reached Earth. Their light contains clues to all that history and space.

The more distant quasars found, the more astronomers will be able to say about the structure of the universe through time, explained Veillet.

"These objects are interesting because they allow us to probe the physical conditions of the universe when it was much younger than it is today," said Strauss. "The CFHT folks are to be congratulated for their discovery."