Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have uncovered a surprising cosmic impostor lurking in the early universe.
The object, a distant galaxy nicknamed Virgil, appears calm and ordinary at first glance.
But when scientists look at it in the right kind of light, it transforms into something far more dramatic: a galaxy powered by a ravenous supermassive black hole.
Virgil is seen as it existed just 800 million years after the Big Bang, during a time when the universe was still very young.
In visible and ultraviolet light, it looks like a typical star-forming galaxy. Nothing about it seems unusual.
But when astronomers observed it in infrared light using JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, known as MIRI, a very different picture emerged.
Hidden behind thick clouds of dust is a supermassive black hole at Virgil’s center, growing at an astonishing rate and releasing huge amounts of energy.
The dust blocks much of this activity from view in visible light, acting like a cosmic disguise. Only infrared light, which can pass through dust, reveals the galaxy’s true nature.
What makes this discovery especially important is the size of the black hole. It appears to be far more massive than the galaxy surrounding it should be able to support.
This puts Virgil in a rare category of so-called “overmassive” black holes, which challenge long-standing ideas about how galaxies and black holes evolved together.
For decades, astronomers believed galaxies formed first and gradually fed the black holes at their centers, with both growing in balance over time. JWST is now showing that this picture may be wrong.
In many cases, black holes seem to grow faster and earlier than their host galaxies. As one of the study’s authors put it, black holes may actually be getting a head start.
Virgil belongs to a puzzling group of objects called Little Red Dots, compact and extremely red sources that JWST has found in large numbers in the early universe.
These objects appeared around 600 million years after the Big Bang and then mostly vanished about a billion years later. Until now, astronomers have struggled to explain what they are and what they eventually became.
Virgil is the reddest Little Red Dot discovered so far, and its hidden black hole may offer a clue to the fate of this mysterious population. If many of these objects host dust-covered black holes, they may have played a much bigger role in shaping the early universe than scientists realized.
The discovery also highlights an important limitation in current observations. Many JWST surveys rely heavily on near-infrared data, which can miss dust-enshrouded objects like Virgil. Deep observations with MIRI take much more time, so astronomers may be overlooking a large population of hidden black holes.
If that’s the case, these obscured giants could have helped reionize the universe during its earliest era, when the first stars and galaxies lit up the cosmos. Future deep MIRI observations will help reveal whether Virgil is truly unique or just the first clearly seen example of a much larger, hidden family.
As JWST continues its mission, astronomers expect more cosmic disguises to fall away, revealing a far more complex and surprising story of how the universe grew up.
Source: University of Arizona.
