– Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers observed a supermassive black hole interacting with two merging satellite galaxies nearly 12 billion light years away.
– The black hole, located in the active galactic nucleus of one galaxy, is feeding on gas and dust and powering an extremely bright quasar called PJ308-21.
– Spectroscopic data from JWST revealed the black hole has a mass of two billion suns and that both it and the host galaxy are highly evolved metal-rich systems, surprisingly so early in the universe’s history.
– The merging of the three galaxies will provide ample fuel for continued growth of the supermassive black hole and quasar.
– JWST detected signatures of photoionization from the quasar in the merging galaxies’ gas, indicating the influence it has on their evolution and metal enrichment over time.
– This observation provides new insights into how some of the earliest supermassive black holes and their host galaxies attained substantial mass growth so soon after the Big Bang.
Source: Space
