Overview
- A team led by Andrew B. Newman published a Science paper reporting on June 4 that they measured a dormant supermassive black hole of about 6 billion solar masses at the center of galaxy MRG-M0138 at redshift ≈2.
- The measurement used stellar dynamics, mapping the speeds of stars near the galaxy’s core with JWST’s NIRSpec integral-field spectrograph to infer the black hole’s gravitational influence.
- Researchers exploited a foreground galaxy cluster that magnified MRG-M0138 by roughly 30 times and produced multiple images, letting JWST resolve the inner region well enough for a dynamical mass estimate.
- The host galaxy is quiescent with little recent star formation, and the authors suggest prior quasar activity from the massive black hole likely removed or heated the gas needed for new stars.
- The work pushes the stellar-dynamics technique from about 700 million light-years to roughly 10 billion light-years and points to using Euclid and Roman to find more lensed targets and Extremely Large Telescopes for higher-resolution confirmations and population studies.