Discovery of oldest black hole in universe has been confirmed: It does not fit into humanity's understanding of nature

The work on the report about the discovery of the oldest black hole in the Universe has undergone peer review and has been published in the journal Nature. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, in the distant and ancient galaxy GN-z11, the central black hole with a record mass for that time was detected. It remains to be speculated on how and why this happened, and it seems that it will be necessary to revise several cosmological theories for this purpose.

The galaxy GN-z11 was initially discovered in observations by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016. This object is located at a distance of 13.4 billion light-years from us, meaning it existed just 440 million years after the Big Bang. The launch of the James Webb Infrared Observatory promised numerous discoveries in the early Universe because light from those times is so stretched during the photons' journey through the abyss of time and space that it simply falls out of the visible range into the infrared.

The spectral analysis of light from GN-z11 showed the presence of highly ionized carbon and neon ions, indicating signs of accretion—a common heating of matter before falling into a black hole. The emission lines in the spectrum were so intense that the black hole, with its radiation, literally overshadowed the host galaxy. Not surprisingly, although the GN-z11 galaxy was 100 times smaller than the Milky Way, the black hole at its center pulled in 1.6 million solar masses, whereas the black hole at the center of our galaxy has 4 million solar masses.

Now that scientists have confirmed the existence of a black hole of unimaginable mass for that time, models and cosmological theories of the evolution of these objects and the Universe itself will need to be rewritten. It appears that Webb will not stop here, allowing for the gathering of enough material to create new models for the formation and growth of black holes and to describe processes in the early Universe.

For example, based on contemporary theories, the black hole at the center of GN-z11 should have been feeding on matter five times faster than we thought. Otherwise, it would not have accumulated the detectable mass by 440 million years after the Big Bang. It also should have originated not from the collapse of a giant star but directly from the collapse of interstellar gas that arose after the birth of the Universe. We can expect that the material collected by Webb will be sufficient to formulate new cosmological hypotheses, which will then evolve into coherent theories.