Space telescopes stumble on rule-breaking black hole in early universe Premium

Discover how researchers found a bizarre black hole feeding at an exceptional rate, challenging theories on black hole growth.

An international team of researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray observatory has discovered a bizarre black hole that may provide insights into the genesis and growth of supermassive black holes.

Supermassive black holes are among the most common types of black holes in the universe. Most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at their centres. These black holes have masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun. The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy has a mass of approximately 4.3 million solar masses.

However, scientists are not yet fully certain how these giants grow to become so big.

The newfound black hole, designated LID-568, is a low-mass supermassive black hole that existed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. If the universe were a human, it could be said to be around eight years old at this time.

A detailed analysis of its effects on its neighbourhood indicated that the black hole was feeding on a surrounding cloud of matter at an exceptional rate — almost 40-times greater than what astrophysicists thought was the upper limit.

The study was led by International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh and the results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy in November 2024.

“We first identified this unusual object through Chandra X-ray observations, as it was exceptionally bright in X-rays but completely invisible in the deepest optical and near-infrared observations, even with the Hubble Space Telescope,” Suh, the lead researcher, said.