UHZ1: Distant Galaxy and Black Hole

Astronomy Picture of the Day · 2023-11-10 · NASA (public domain)

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UHZ1: Distant Galaxy and Black Hole — APOD for 2023-11-10

Dominated by dark matter , massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2744 is known to some as Pandora's Cluster . It lies 3.5 billion light-years away toward the constellation Sculptor. Using the galaxy cluster's enormous mass as a gravitational lens to warp spacetime and magnify even more distant objects directly behind it, astronomers have found a background galaxy, UHZ1, at a remarkable redshift of Z=10.1 . That puts UHZ1 far beyond Abell 2744, at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years, seen when our universe was about 3 percent of its current age. UHZ1 is identified in the insets of this composited image combining X-rays (purple hues) from the spacebased Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope. The X-ray emission from UHZ1 detected in the Chandra data is the telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole at the center of the ultra high redshift galaxy. That makes UHZ1's growing black hole the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, a result that now hints at how and when the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed .

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2023-11-10 — image & explanation courtesy of NASA (public domain), mirrored at Tukuk-OS for reading and search convenience.

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