A team of astronomers may have made the first ever discovery of a newborn supermassive black hole.
If confirmed, the discovery would mean that supermassive black holes can form rapidly, and not just soon after the Big Bang, but throughout the history of the cosmos.
The black hole candidate has been discovered in a distant galaxy known as the Infinity Galaxy.
It could be a huge piece in the puzzle as to why Webb has been discovering massive black holes so soon after the Big Bang.
Supermassive black holes
Astronomers know that most major galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre.
This is the case even with our own Milky Way galaxy, which has a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* at its centre.
These supermassive black holes can often be seen as the bright centres of galaxies.
As matter falls in towards the central black hole, enormous amounts of energy generated cause the material to glow brightly at different wavelengths.
This appears as a glowing galactic core, known as an active galactic nucleus.
What’s more, these central supermassive black holes likely play a key role in their galaxy’s evolution.
The Infinity Galaxy
Astronomers discovered the Infinity Galaxy by looking through data in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope archive.
It’s about 8 billion lightyears from Earth.
Its nickname is a result of its resemblance to the horizontal figure 8 symbol for ‘infinity’.
Consisting of two rings of stars and gas, the say it’s like the Infinity Galaxy likely formed from the collision of two galaxies.
The Infinity Galaxy’s strange appearance led the team to explore it with archival X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio data from the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).
These telescopes seem to have uncovered a growing supermassive black hole in this galaxy.
The composite image of the Infinity Galaxy seen at the top of this article contains X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red, green and blue).
Webb data shows two rings of stars and gas, which could be the result of a collision of two galaxies.
The centres of the two galaxies are the white-orange sources in the middle of the two rings, in the lower left and upper right of the galaxy.
Discovering the black hole
“Everything is unusual about this galaxy,” says Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, who led the study.
“Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s accreting a lot of material.
“The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei of the merging galaxies, but in the middle. We asked ourselves: how can we make sense of this?”
Very Large Array data suggests the supermassive black hole is found between both galaxies in a cloud of gas.
Chandra data shows the growing black hole near the centre of the galaxy.
So how did it get there?
The team say the Infinity Galaxy’s black hole may have formed from the cloud of gas within the galaxy, or could have migrated from elsewhere.
Or, it could be in the core of a third galaxy that’s much fainter.
If the black hole did migrate, the team say it would be travelling at a different speed to the gas could in the Infinity Galaxy.
So, the team used Webb to compare the velocity of the black hole with the velocity of the gas.
They say that, based on their first glance at Webb’s observations, the two velocities are very similar.
This means the supermassive black hole formed within the cloud of gas and did so recently, after the collision of the galaxies about 50 million years earlier.
Solving the early black hole mystery
The results could have large implications for recent studies showing black holes can reach significant masses very early after the Big Bang.
One theory is the ‘light seeds’ theory, which says supermassive black holes began their lives small, and formed from the collapse of massive stars.
‘Light seed’ black holes grow into supermassive black holes, but this would take much longer to happen than some of the early supermassive black holes observed by the James Webb Space Telescope soon after the Big Bang.
The ‘heavy seeds’ theory suggests larger black holes can form from the direct collapse of large clouds of gas.
“We reported on the first evidence for the formation of such direct collapse heavy seeds using the combined power of Webb and Chandra to detect the galaxy UHZ1, in place when the Universe was merely 470 million years old,” says Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, a co-author on this study.
“This black hole would have formed over five billion years after the Big Bang, much later than UHZ1,” says Natarajan.
“So, what is exciting about the discovery of the Infinity Galaxy is that it hints that nature likely makes black holes via direct collapse throughout cosmic time.”
This suggests the extreme conditions needed to form black holes soon after the Big Bang may also exist more recently.
“In this case, two disk galaxies collided, forming the ring structures of stars that we see,” says van Dokkum.
“During the collision, the gas within these two galaxies shocks and compresses. This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot that then collapsed into a black hole.”
Read the submitted paper at ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250615619V/abstract