Earliest confirmed black hole ever discovered is a true monster from the dawn of time

Light just landed in Earth telescopes after traveling for 13.3 billion years. Astronomers have confirmed a black hole in a tiny galaxy named CAPERS-LRD-z9, observed only 500 million years after the Big Bang – when the universe was just 3% of its current age.

That single result opens a rare window into how early galaxies worked and how fast their darkest hearts could grow.

This object sits in a period when gas, stars, and black holes were taking shape under new rules. Seeing it at all is a small miracle of precision spectroscopy and patient sky surveys. It’s also a timely reminder that the early universe had surprises tucked into every corner.

CAPERS-LRD-z9 pushes today’s tech

“When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go. We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,” enthused Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center. She’s the lead researcher on the team that made this discovery.

Their research was published on Aug. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal.

“While astronomers have found a few, more distant candidates,” added Steven Finkelstein, a co-author on the paper and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center, “they have yet to find the distinct spectroscopic signature associated with a black hole.”

What spectroscopy shows

With spectroscopy, astronomers split light into its component wavelengths and read the physical story inside.

For black holes, they look for fast gas whipping around the object: light stretched to redder wavelengths on the far side and squeezed to bluer wavelengths on the near side.

“There aren’t many other things that create this signature,” explained Taylor. “And this galaxy has it!”

Those fingerprints are the key to turning a promising candidate into a confirmed detection. In this case, they also tie the galaxy’s unusual color and brightness to the activity of a central black hole rather than to a giant crowd of newborn stars.

Webb Telescope and CAPERS-LRD-z9

The team used data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s CAPERS (CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey) program for its search.

Launched in 2021, JWST provides the most far-reaching views of space available, and CAPERS offers observations at the outermost edge.

“The first goal of CAPERS is to confirm and study the most distant galaxies,” said Mark Dickinson, a co-author on the paper and the CAPERS team lead.

“JWST spectroscopy is the key to confirming their distances and understanding their physical properties.”

Initially seen as an interesting speck in the program’s imagery, CAPERS-LRD-z9 turned out to be part of a new class of galaxies known as Little Red Dots.

Present only in the first 1.5 billion years of the universe, these galaxies are very compact, red, and unexpectedly bright.

Tiny red galaxy’s secret

“The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early JWST data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope,” explained Finkelstein. “Now, we’re in the process of figuring out what they’re like and how they came to be.”

CAPERS-LRD-z9 sharpens that picture. Its brightness points to intense energy output, but at such early times, packing enough stars to explain it is unlikely.

Black holes, on the other hand, radiate strongly as they heat and compress the gas they consume, and the spectrum here lines up with that scenario.

Why the color skews red

The newfound galaxy may also help explain the distinct red color that defines Little Red Dots. The team points to a thick cloud of gas around the black hole that shifts the light toward redder wavelengths as the light passes through.

“We’ve seen these clouds in other galaxies,” explained Taylor. “When we compared this object to those other sources, it was an excellent match.”

That same cocoon of material can both hide and highlight the black hole’s presence, depending on how the light escapes. Here, it helped seal the case.

Early monster mass, measured

This galaxy is also notable for the size of its central black hole. The estimate is as high as 300 million times the mass of the sun – up to half the mass of all the stars in its host galaxy.

Finding such a heavy object so soon after the cosmic clock started keeps the pressure on theories of early growth.

“This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,” said Finkelstein. “Or they may have started out far more massive than our models predict.”

Those numbers matter because later black holes have eons to feed and collide. In the first few hundred million years, there isn’t much time. A result like this clamps down the options for how these giants get started.

What’s next for CAPERS-LRD-z9

To keep the momentum, the team aims to gather higher-resolution JWST observations. That follow-up could tease apart the gas motions, map the obscuring cloud, and test ideas about how Little Red Dots are built.

“This is a good test object for us,” said Taylor. “We haven’t been able to study early black hole evolution until recently, and we are excited to see what we can learn from this unique object.”

As CAPERS adds more galaxies like this to the ledger, patterns should emerge: how common such massive black holes were, how they shaped their hosts, and how quickly their neighborhoods changed.

When stars return to black holes

Another recent study spotlights a different kind of black hole behavior closer to home in time. It reports the first spectroscopic proof of a repeated partial tidal-disruption event (pTDE).

This phenomenon is a case where a star on an elongated orbit loses some of its outer layers each time it loops near a galaxy’s central black hole, then survives to return. The authors nicknamed the source “the unluckiest star.”

The flare first appeared in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, then the same galaxy brightened again 2 years later in the same spot with nearly the same temperature, about 26,000 K, and only a slightly lower peak brightness.

Spectra taken during both flares showed matching hydrogen Balmer lines and N III features. No significant X-ray, radio, or mid-infrared signals were seen, strengthening the pTDE interpretation by ruling out common look-alikes.

The spectroscopic match points to a 2-year return time and provides a clean example of a “repeat offender.”

Why CAPERS-LRD-z9 matters

One result nails down a supermassive black hole when the universe was 3% of its current age; the other shows a black hole slowly peeling a star on a 2-year clock in the more recent universe.

Together they highlight how black holes shape galaxies across time – by lighting up their surroundings, by altering the color and brightness of compact early systems, and by stripping material from stars in measured bites.

Each data point tightens constraints on theory. CAPERS-LRD-z9 shows how massive black holes already were 13.3 billion years ago.

The pTDE case clarifies how black holes feed in steps, with spectral line matches serving as a decisive test. Different eras, different tools, same goal: use light to pin down the unseen.

The full study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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