A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a whole new class of enormous “naked” black holes, upends the textbook understanding of the young universe.

“This is completely off the scale,” said Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who helped reveal the nature of the object in a preprint posted on August 29. “It’s terribly exciting. It’s highly informative.”

“It’s pushing the boundaries on what we think might be true, what we think might happen,” said Dale Kocevski, an astronomer at Colby College who was not involved in the new research.

Astronomers spied the bare black hole using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — a mega-instrument built by NASA and its partners in part to reveal how galaxies formed during the universe’s first billion years. This new black hole, which is as heavy as 50 million suns and is dubbed QSO1, clashes with the old, provisional account of the galaxy formation process, which did not start with black holes. Black holes were thought to have come along only after a galaxy’s stars gravitationally collapsed into black holes that then merged and grew. But Maiolino and his colleagues described a solitary leviathan with no parent galaxy in sight.

The question now is how this black hole came to exist.

The most exciting — and controversial — possibility dates back to a 1971 proposal from the British physicist Stephen Hawking: that black holes arose in the primordial soup of the Big Bang itself. In that case, the object would have been sitting in the dark since the universe’s first moments, waiting for stars and galaxies to illuminate it.

QSO1 is one of hundreds of similar-looking objects nicknamed “little red dots” that JWST has spotted in its first few years of peering into the deepest recesses of time. Astrophysicists can’t say yet whether these dots are all black holes or not, and in general they’re still confused about the universe’s chaotic childhood. But the telescope’s snapshots suggest a rowdy young cosmos that fabricated big black holes and galaxies both together and independently, or maybe even a universe where black holes were among the first large structures in existence — dark tapioca bubbles in an otherwise smoothly blended cosmic tea.

QSO1 and the rest of the little red dots “tell us we don’t know anything,” said John Regan, a theorist at Maynooth University in Ireland. “It has been really exciting and very electrifying for the field.”

Pale Red Dots

Lukas Furtak, an astronomer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, knew QSO1 was extraordinary the moment he saw it — or the moment he saw its three reflections hiding among a smattering of splotchy white galaxies in an image taken by JWST in 2023. It’s “something that pops out immediately,” Furtak said over Zoom, clicking on three nearly imperceptible red specks. “There are three red point sources here, here, this one up here.”

In the image, a fortuitous placement of galaxies and dark matter has bent light rays traveling from background objects just as a glass lens might; this “gravitational lens” reveals objects deeper in the early universe than the telescope could otherwise see. The lens magnifies and stretches the stuff behind it, sometimes creating multiple images of it. Furtak was mapping out the banana-shaped smears of galaxies that the lens had projected into multiple places when he spotted the three red dots of QSO1.

The dots caught his eye because they show no signs of stretching. He knew that the only thing that looks like a small, round point even after getting stretched out is an even smaller, rounder point. This was no galaxy, he figured; it must be a black hole, a concentration of mass so dense that its gravity creates an inescapable zone of space around it.

Over the next six months, Furtak and collaborators directed JWST to stare at each of the three red dots for 40 hours each to take a census of the colors of light coming from the object, known as a spectrum. That study concluded that QSO1 is very likely a glowing black hole packing a mass of tens of millions of suns into a span of at most 100 light-years across, seen as it appeared when the universe was just 750 million years old. (Today the cosmos is approaching 14 billion years old.)