Science

JWST is [very high] up and running, and along with producing some undeniably pretty pictures,

it has also seen very far back in time, possibly as early as 180 million years after the big bang. If you’re like me, and you want to know about supermassive black holes, why would you be excited about that? After all, it’s not like there were supermassive black holes hanging around 180 millions years after the big bang…right?

The above images, which I should clarify are not from JWST, amazingly are showing a supermassive black hole 690 million years after the big bang. Raise your hand if you see where I’m going with this. 690 minus 180 million years is a lot of years, but not that many if you’re trying to build a supermassive black hole, because we suspect that they should not grow that fast.

Ok. So that’s a puzzle.

What else do we know about supermassive black holes? Well, we know that they are generally of the one per galaxy variety. We can also look at (relatively) nearby ones,

and from doing that can determine that they weigh a fixed amount of what their galaxy weighs. But if they were made in the early universe, as we now know some of them were, how could that be true, when galaxies grow over the whole history of the universe? We know the answer to this, which is that black holes also grow sometimes, but we are still trying to figure out under which conditions this can occur.

These are a few of the questions that my research tries to address.