This X-Ray / Energy River... Literally "Runs Over Rocks, From The Basement Of Time": Oldest Black Hole Ever Imaged... Looking Back, 13.2 Billion Years.

These scales are hard to fathom -- as distance equals time, on the cosmic scale. Billions of light years is billions of years, back in time -- with the light just now reaching us.

So it is that Chandra with JWST has spotted a cluster called UHZ1 (being greatly magnified by Abell 2744, out in front of it). . . and the cluster's gas and debris are about 13.2 billion years old, or 13.2 billion light years away -- at the very edge of our known Universe. Here's the bit:

. . .“We needed [JWST] to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing.

Bogdan and his team found the black hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. [The] data, however, has revealed the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was only 3% of its current age.

Then over two weeks of observations with Chandra showed the presence of intense, superheated, X-ray emitting gas in this galaxy – a trademark for a growing supermassive black hole. The light from the galaxy and the X-rays from gas around its supermassive black hole are magnified by about a factor of four by intervening matter in Abell 2744 (due to gravitational lensing), enhancing the infrared signal detected by [JWST] and allowing Chandra to detect the faint X-ray source. . . .

Indeed -- what an astonishing time to be awake. . . and alive! As Norman said -- "Under the river are the rocks from the basement of time, and under the rocks, are timeless raindrops. . . and under those, are the words. Some of them. . . my words, to you. . . ." Onward. . . grinning.

नमस्ते