Astronomers utilizing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) identified a rapidly growing supermassive black hole in the galaxy LID-568, located approximately 12.3 billion light-years from Earth.
This black hole, observed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, is consuming matter at a rate 40 times the theoretical Eddington limit—the maximum rate at which a black hole can accrete mass without its radiation pressure halting further infall.
The discovery challenges existing models of black hole growth, suggesting that some early-universe black holes expanded more swiftly than previously thought. The intense accretion observed in LID-568 implies that such black holes could have formed from massive gas clouds, bypassing the slower growth associated with stellar remnants.
JWST’s advanced infrared capabilities were crucial in detecting LID-568, as the galaxy is faint in optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) provided detailed spectra, revealing powerful gas outflows indicative of the black hole’s rapid feeding.
This finding offers new insights into the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in the early universe, highlighting the need for further observations to understand the mechanisms driving such extreme accretion rates.
It seems that our models for the development of the early cosmos have finally had their day: the James Webb Telescope has now detected a whole series of mysterious structures from the early days of the universe that shouldn’t actually exist at all in this form! Well, at least on paper but because the cosmos is obviously not very interested in our models and theories, Webb has already identified 6 mysterious galaxies that appear much too large and massive for their time of origin, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
And now the most powerful space telescope of all time has already captured the next mystery: In the heart of a galaxy that already existed when the universe was only 770 million years old, Webb detected a colossal black hole of over a billion solar masses! Experts have no idea how the gravity monster was able to grow to such dimensions when the universe itself was still in its infancy. Could it be that we are dealing here with the remnant of a previous universe? After all, we must not forget one thing: the Big Bang theory is currently coming under increasing criticism and more than a few researchers consider it more likely that the cosmos is in fact undergoing an eternal cycle of decline and rebirth!
