Surprisingly Massive Early Universe Black Holes Challenge Cosmic Theories

Surprisingly unspectacular: Black hole already weighed over a billion solar masses in the early universe despite average appetite.

Peering into the early stages of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe, the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a galaxy as it existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang. It is puzzling how the black hole at its center could already weigh a billion solar masses when the universe was still in its infancy. The James Webb observations were designed to take a closer look at the feeding mechanism, but they found nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently, black holes were already growing in a similar way to today. But the result is all the more significant: it could show that astronomers know less about how galaxies form than they thought. And yet the measurements are by no means disappointing. On the contrary.