Five hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler, a tiny red galaxy flickered into being. Astronomers didn’t expect it to hide anything unusual. Yet inside this compact dot, scientists have now confirmed the presence of the most distant black hole ever discovered — a cosmic heavyweight that defies our understanding of how black holes form.
“This is about as far back as you can practically go,” said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect.”
A Monster Inside a Little Red Dot
The galaxy is called CAPERS-LRD-z9. It sits so far away that the light reaching us today started its journey 13.3 billion years ago, when the cosmos was just 3% of its current age. At first glance, the galaxy looked like one of many “Little Red Dots” — faint, compact objects discovered only after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began peering into the early universe.
“The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early Webb data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope,” explained Steven Finkelstein, a co-author and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center at UT Austin.
But CAPERS-LRD-z9 isn’t just a dot in the night’s sky. It contains an active galactic nucleus — a huge black hole that is ravenously feeding on surrounding matter. As gas spirals inward, it heats up and glows with extraordinary brightness.
“There aren’t many other things that create this signature,” Taylor said. “And this galaxy has it!”
Bigger Than It Has Any Right to Be
Here’s the shocking part: the black hole is estimated to weigh up to 300 million times the mass of our Sun. That’s nearly half the combined mass of all the stars in its galaxy. For comparison, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is only about 4 million solar masses.
“This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,” said Finkelstein. “Or they started out far more massive than our models predict.”
Normally, astronomers think of black holes as starting small — perhaps the remains of giant stars — and slowly bulking up over billions of years. But this one had already ballooned into a galactic overlord within just a few hundred million years.
How do you make a monster black hole so quickly? The study suggests two possible paths:
- Start with a heavy “seed” black hole, perhaps 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, formed by the collapse of a gigantic gas cloud.
- Or begin with a smaller one, just 100 solar masses, and grow it by super-charged feeding at rates beyond what standard physics predicts.
Some scientists even speculate that primordial black holes, born in the chaos of the Big Bang itself, could be lurking at the dawn of time.
The galaxy’s striking red color offers another clue. CAPERS-LRD-z9 appears wrapped in a dense cocoon of gas, which not only obscures it but also shifts its light toward redder wavelengths. “When we compared this object to those other sources, it was a dead ringer,” Taylor said.
Why This Matters
Little Red Dots like CAPERS-LRD-z9 may be the ancestors of galaxies like our own. They flickered into existence early, shone brightly for a short while, and then faded. By confirming the first spectroscopic signature of a black hole inside one, astronomers can now connect these strange dots to the birth of galaxies themselves.
Finding CAPERS-LRD-z9 doesn’t just push the boundary of what telescopes can see. It forces us to rethink how the first cosmic structures emerged. As Taylor put it: “This is a good test object for us. We haven’t been able to study early black hole evolution until recently, and we are excited to see what we can learn from this unique object.”
In other words, the earliest monsters in the universe are finally revealing themselves — and they are bigger, brighter, and stranger than we ever imagined.
