Our NASA ChandraXray and NASA James Webb telescopes have joined forces to capture the most distant black hole ever seen in X-rays. This black hole is located 13.2 billion light years from Earth. That means we imaged it 470 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 3 per cent of its present age.

The data show that this black hole has a mass between 10 and 100 million suns. This result suggests that some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe were formed from massive gas clouds.

Image descriptions
1) The composite image shows data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope. Small white, purple and red celestial objects densely dot the black sea of space. A neon purple cloud of X-ray gas washes over the centre.

2) The second image is identical to the first, but there is a small square just to the right of the centre of the image highlighting the old black hole. In the upper left corner of the image are two zoomed-in images of this black hole seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope.