Astronomers have confirmed the most distant black hole ever found, giving us a glimpse of one of the universe’s very first cosmic giants.
The discovery comes from an international team led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, who spotted the black hole inside a young galaxy called CAPERS-LRD-z9.
This galaxy existed only 500 million years after the Big Bang—about 13.3 billion years ago—when the universe was just 3% of its current age.
“This is about as far back as we can realistically look with today’s technology,” said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher who led the study. Their findings, published August 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, push the boundaries of what astronomers can see.
Other possible black holes have been suggested at even greater distances, but this is the first one confirmed by spectroscopy.
This technique splits light into its different wavelengths, revealing key details about an object. In this case, astronomers found the unique signature of gas whirling around a black hole at incredible speeds—its light stretched redder when moving away from us and bluer when moving toward us. “There aren’t many other things that create this pattern,” Taylor explained. “And this galaxy has it.”
The discovery was made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been peering farther into space than ever before since its launch in 2021.
CAPERS, the survey program that captured the data, was designed to confirm the most distant galaxies and measure their properties. At first, CAPERS-LRD-z9 appeared to be just a faint dot in Webb’s images. But closer inspection showed it belonged to a strange new class of galaxies called “Little Red Dots.”
These galaxies, which only existed in the first 1.5 billion years of the universe, are small, very red, and surprisingly bright. Their brightness puzzled astronomers, since they formed so early, when there shouldn’t have been enough stars to create such intense light. A growing idea is that supermassive black holes could be powering them instead.
CAPERS-LRD-z9 strengthens this theory. Its brilliant glow likely comes from its central black hole, which is swallowing nearby gas and releasing enormous amounts of energy. The galaxy’s deep red color may also be explained by thick clouds of gas around the black hole, shifting the light into redder wavelengths as it passes through.
What makes this black hole truly extraordinary is its size. Astronomers estimate it is up to 300 million times the mass of our sun—roughly half the mass of all the stars in its tiny galaxy. Finding something so massive so early in time challenges current theories of how black holes grow. Either they gained weight far faster than scientists thought possible, or they were born much larger than expected.
The team hopes to use JWST for even sharper observations of CAPERS-LRD-z9. This “monster from the dawn of time” could help reveal how black holes shaped the first galaxies—and perhaps the universe itself.
