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One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics is how supermassive black holes form in the early Universe and grow to be SO supermassive. There's a limit to how fast they can grow in mass, so they shouldn't exist so early in the Universe's history. Yet the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray observatory have together just found the most distant supermassive black hole known (at a redshift of z=10.3, meaning the Universe was just 450 million years old when the light left that galaxy). The best estimate we have of the black hole's mass puts it at about the same mass as it's galaxy! Suggesting that perhaps the black hole formed FIRST as direct collapse black hole and then the galaxy of stars formed around it... essentially solving the astrophysics equivalent of: "what came first the chicken or the egg? "

Bogdán et al. (2023; discovery of growing SMBH in UHZ1) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15458.pdf
Castellano et al. (2023; initial discovery of UHZ1 with JWST) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.06666.pdf
Wang et al. (2023; previous most distant SMBH known) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.03179.pdf
Madau & Rees (2001; light seeds of SMBH formation) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/010122...
Lodato & Natarajan (2006; heavy seed direct collapse black hole SMBH formation) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/060615...
Arrabal-Haro et al. (2023; JWST spectra reveals galaxy at closer distance than first thought from images) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.15431.pdf
JWST proposal 3073 (follow up of Castellano et al. (2023)) - https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...

My previous video on direct collapse black holes (warning, this is an old video from the early days of my channel and its horrendously out of focus) -    • Unsolved Mystery in Physics | Direct ...  
My previous video on JWST's over-massive galaxies -    • JWST has found MASSIVE galaxies in th...  
My previous video on a suggested fix to JWST's over-massive galaxies -    • JWST has found MASSIVE galaxies in th...  

00:00 - Introduction
02:51 - Ground News
04:23 - The different formation theories for SMBHs (including direct collapse)
08:14 - How Bogdán et al. found UHZ1, the most distant SMBH known
12:26 - How Bogdán et al. calculated the black hole mass of UHZ1
14:33 - Why the black hole to stellar mass ratio gives evidence for direct collapse black holes
17:25 - Some caveats and what’s next
22:02 - Bloopers

Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


http://drbecky.uk.com
https://rebeccasmethurst.co.uk