In a discovery that feels ripped from the pages of cosmic poetry, astronomers have found a galaxy shaped like the infinity symbol, and nestled at its heart may be something even more extraordinary: a newborn supermassive black hole.
Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and his team stumbled upon this celestial oddity while combing through images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. What they saw was jaw-dropping: two galaxies amid a collision, their swirling stars forming a glowing figure eight. And right in the center, not in either galactic nucleus, but between them, sat a black hole, embedded in a cloud of gas and actively feeding.
“This is as close to a smoking gun as we’re likely ever going to get,” van Dokkum said.
This isn’t just a cool-shaped galaxy. It could rewrite our understanding of how black holes form.
Scientists detected a chirp of a baby black hole
Traditionally, scientists believed that black holes formed from the remnants of dying stars, small “light seeds” that slowly merged over time. But Webb has already spotted massive black holes too early in the universe’s timeline for that theory to hold up.
Enter the ‘heavy seeds’ theory, championed by Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan. It suggests black holes can form directly from collapsing gas clouds, skipping the star stage entirely. The Infinity galaxy might be the first real-world example of that process in action.
According to van Dokkum, the two disk galaxies collided, compressing their gas into dense knots. One of those knots may have collapsed into the black hole now visible as a glowing region between the galactic cores. It’s a rare event, but similar conditions were likely common in the early universe.
As the evidence builds, one detail stands out with cosmic clarity: the black hole isn’t situated within the core of either galaxy. Instead, it occupies a curious position between them, a gravitational outsider lodged at their center. What’s more, it’s not idle.
This black hole is voraciously feeding, pulling in surrounding material and growing larger with each passing moment. Enveloping it is a cloud of ionized gas, signaling the kind of intense compression astronomers associate with high-energy, transformative cosmic events. Altogether, these signs suggest something rare and spectacular.
The team used data not just from Webb but also from the Keck Observatory, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Very Large Array to confirm their findings. Still, they say more research is needed to be sure this is truly a black hole being born.
But if it is? We may be witnessing something no one has ever seen before: the birth of a cosmic giant.
Journal References:
- Pieter van Dokkum, Gabriel Brammer, Josephine F. W. Baggen, Michael A. Keim, Priyamvada Natarajan, Imad Pasha. The Infinity Galaxy: a Candidate Direct-Collapse Supermassive Black Hole Between Two Massive, Ringed Nuclei. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2506.15618
- Pieter van Dokkum, Gabriel Brammer, Connor Jennings, Imad Pasha, Josephine F. W. Baggen. Further Evidence for a Direct-Collapse Origin of the Supermassive Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2506.15619