In the vast, mysterious depths of the cosmos, a celestial giant is rewriting the rules of black hole physics. Meet SMSS J052915.80-435152.0, or J0529 for short, a black hole so luminous, so ferocious, and so far away that it’s challenging everything we thought we knew about the universe’s darkest entities.
First spotted in 2024 by Associate Professor Christian Wolf and his team at The Australian National University (ANU), J0529 is located more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. That’s so distant, its light began its journey toward us when the universe was still in its infancy.
Now, thanks to cutting-edge optical equipment at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, scientists have zoomed in on this cosmic powerhouse like never before. The results? Jaw-dropping.
“Despite the quasar’s extreme luminosity, the black hole at its heart was found to have a mass equal to ‘only’ around one billion suns,” Associate Professor Wolf explained.
That’s a staggering figure, but still more than 10 times less massive than previously estimated. Why the discrepancy? It turns out this black hole isn’t quietly devouring matter like others of its kind. It’s violently ejecting it.
“Instead of rapidly rotating as previously presumed, this black hole is belching up the gas it’s feeding on. The ferocious density of light is blowing the gas away. This is the brightest object in the universe we know of,” Wolf added.
Gas is being hurled outward at speeds reaching 10,000 kilometers per second, fast enough to circle Earth in under five minutes. It’s a cosmic geyser, spewing light and matter into the void.
This revelation doesn’t just change the numbers; it changes the narrative.
“This points at a solution to the question of where all these huge black holes in the universe are coming from,” Wolf said.
“While the rate at which they grow is still too fast to be explained easily, the re-weighing of this object and ones like it means that supermassive black holes may well originate from collapsing stars in the early stages of the universe, which had until recently seemed impossible.”
In other words, the cosmic giants we see today may have humble beginnings, born from the deaths of ancient stars, rather than exotic, unexplained phenomena.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the technology that made this discovery possible is about to get even better. Professor Michael Ireland from ANU is working with ESO to push the boundaries of interferometry, a technique that combines light from multiple telescopes to create ultra-high-resolution images.
“My research area is the birth of planets around young stars, which the new technology at ESO will revolutionize. In the near future, our own creation story will only get more colorful,” Professor Ireland said.
As astronomers continue to peer deeper into the universe, J0529 stands as a beacon, not just of light, but of possibility. It reminds us that the cosmos is full of surprises, and that with the right tools and teamwork, we can uncover secrets that were once thought unreachable.
From the birth of planets to the belching of black holes, the universe is speaking. And now, we’re finally learning how to listen.
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Journal Reference:
- GRAVITY+ Collaboration et al, Spatially resolved broad line region in a quasar at z=4: Dynamical black hole mass and prominent outflow, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.13911