Webb Telescope Spots Most Distant Quiescent Black Hole

Key facts

• James Webb Space Telescope identified a supermassive black hole in galaxy MRG-M0138.
• The black hole's mass is 6 billion times the Sun's mass.
• The galaxy MRG-M0138 is a quiescent galaxy.
• The observation dates to when the universe was 3 billion years old.
• The NIRSpec Integral Field Spectrograph was used for the discovery.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected what is believed to be the most distant quiescent black hole ever found. This supermassive black hole resides in MRG-M0138, a gravitationally lensed galaxy observed as it was when the universe was approximately 3 billion years old. The black hole's mass is estimated to be 6 billion times that of the Sun. The analysis of the data was performed using the NIRSpec Integral Field Spectrograph, an instrument aboard the JWST.