An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most distant black hole ever observed, a behemoth residing in a galaxy known as CAPERS-LRD-z9 just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery, led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin‘s Cosmic Frontier Center, pushes the James Webb Space Telescope to its limits to study the universe when it was just 3% of its current age. This ancient object provides a rare look into the cosmic dawn, a mysterious period when the first galaxies and black holes were forming. The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

To make the confirmation, scientists used a technique called spectroscopy, which splits an object’s light into a spectrum of different wavelengths, much like a prism creates a rainbow. “There aren’t many other things that create this signature,” explained Anthony Taylor, lead author of the study in a university press release, referring to the unique pattern created by gas swirling into a black hole at incredible speeds. This distinct signature, captured by JWST’s CAPERS survey program, provided the “smoking gun” evidence that distinguished it from other, more distant candidates that lack such definitive proof.

The galaxy housing the black hole is part of a newly identified class of objects called “Little Red Dots” (LRDs), which are surprisingly bright and compact galaxies found only in the early universe. The discovery helps solve a key puzzle about LRDs: their intense brightness likely comes not from an impossibly large number of stars, but from the immense energy released by a central, supermassive black hole as it consumes surrounding material. Furthermore, its distinct red color is believed to be caused by a thick shroud of dense gas that surrounds the black hole, altering the light that passes through it.

This early black hole is also remarkably massive for its age, estimated to be up to 300 million times the mass of our sun. Finding such a giant so soon after the Big Bang challenges current models of cosmic evolution. “This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,” said co-author Steven Finkelstein. This implies that black holes in the early universe either originated from much more massive “seeds” than predicted or underwent periods of extremely rapid, “super-Eddington” growth, forcing scientists to reconsider how the universe’s first giants formed.

References

• Dickinson, M., Amorin, R., Arrabal Haro, P., Bagley, M., Barro, G., Buat, V., Burgarella, D., Calabro’, A., Carnall, A., Casey, C. M., Chworowsky, K., Cleri, N. J., Cole, J., Cooper, M., Cullen, F., Daddi, E., Donnan, C., Dunlop, J. S., Elbaz, D., … Zavala, J. (2024). The candels-area prism epoch of reionization survey(Capers). JWST Proposal. Cycle 3, 6368. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024jwst.prop.6368D/abstract

• Taylor, A. J., Kokorev, V., Kocevski, D. D., Akins, H. B., Cullen, F., Dickinson, M., Finkelstein, S. L., Arrabal Haro, P., Bromm, V., Giavalisco, M., Inayoshi, K., Juneau, S., Leung, G. C. K., Pérez-González, P. G., Somerville, R. S., Trump, J. R., Amorín, R. O., Barro, G., Burgarella, D., … Zavala, J. A. (2025). Capers-lrd-z9: A gas-enshrouded little red dot hosting a broad-line active galactic nucleus at z = 9. 288. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 989(1), L7. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ade789

• University of Texas at Austin. (2025, August 6). Meet the universe’s earliest confirmed black hole: A monster at the dawn of time. Phys.Org; University of Texas at Austin. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-universe-earliest-black-hole-monster.html