UHZ1: Distant Galaxy and Black Hole
Dominated by dark matter,
massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2744 is known to some as
Pandora's Cluster.
It lies 3.5 billion light-years away toward the constellation Sculptor.
Using the galaxy cluster's enormous mass as a gravitational lens
to warp spacetime and magnify even more distant objects
directly behind it, astronomers
have found a background galaxy, UHZ1, at a
remarkable
redshift of
Z=10.1.
That puts UHZ1 far beyond Abell 2744,
at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years, seen when
our universe was about 3 percent of its current age.
UHZ1 is identified in
the insets
of this composited image combining X-rays (purple hues) from the
spacebased Chandra X-ray Observatory and
infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The X-ray emission from UHZ1 detected in the Chandra data is
the telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole
at the center of the ultra high redshift galaxy.
That makes UHZ1's growing black hole the most
distant black hole ever detected in X-rays,
a result that now hints at how and when the first supermassive
black holes in the universe formed.