Webb Telescope Spots Most Distant Quiescent Black Hole

Key facts

• The James Webb Space Telescope has identified a supermassive black hole in the galaxy MRG-M0138.
• The black hole is 6 billion times the mass of the Sun.
• The galaxy MRG-M0138 is a quiescent galaxy.
• This black hole existed when the universe was 3 billion years old.
• The discovery was made using data from the NIRSpec Integral Field Spectrograph.

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.