A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a whole new class of enormous “naked” black holes, upends the textbook understanding of the young universe.
“This is completely off the scale,” said Roberto Maiolino (opens a new tab), an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who helped reveal the nature of the object in a preprint posted on August 29 (opens a new tab). “It’s terribly exciting. It’s highly informative.”
“It’s pushing the boundaries on what we think might be true, what we think might happen,” said Dale Kocevski (opens a new tab), an astronomer at Colby College who was not involved in the new research.
Astronomers spied the bare black hole using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — a mega-instrument built by NASA and its partners in part to reveal how galaxies formed during the universe’s first billion years. This new black hole, which is as heavy as 50 million suns and is dubbed QSO1, clashes with the old, provisional account of the galaxy formation process, which did not start with black holes. Black holes were thought to have come along only after a galaxy’s stars gravitationally collapsed into black holes that then merged and grew. But Maiolino and his colleagues described a solitary leviathan with no parent galaxy in sight.
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