Roberto Maiolino

University of Cambridge

Research field

Galaxies and black holes in the early universe

Roberto Maiolino studies how galaxies and black holes formed and evolved, in recent years with the spectrograph NIRSpec on JWST. In the paper featured here he and his colleagues show that GN-z11, a galaxy seen 440 million years after the Big Bang, hosts an accreting black hole of about a million solar masses. The result constrains how the seeds of supermassive black holes formed. The unit uses it as the worked case of what JWST spectra reveal about the first galaxies.

In the masterclass

Section 5 describes how JWST finds galaxies at redshifts above 10 and then presents the black hole in GN-z11.

The research is presented in Unit 16: Frontiers of Astrophysics, in a research spotlight box that explains the result at the level of the unit and links it to the physics you have just learned.

The paper

A small and vigorous black hole in the early Universe