Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 10, 2026
Black holes too massive for the young universe
Telescopes keep finding supermassive black holes and quasars from within the universe's first billion years that are already billions of times the mass of the sun, far more massive than current models of black hole growth can explain. The arc is the accumulating fossil record from the early universe running ahead of any accepted mechanism for how these objects got so big so fast.
The story so far
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Jul 10, 2026 Latest
The Euclid telescope found 31 of the oldest quasars ever detected, including the two earliest known, shining from a universe only about 670 million years old, each powered by a black hole billions of times the sun's mass. Co-author Joseph Hennawi of UC Santa Barbara and Leiden University said astronomers do not yet understand how they grew so massive so fast.
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Jan 17, 2024
The James Webb Space Telescope reached back further still, catching an active black hole in the galaxy GN-z11 as it was about 430 million years after the Big Bang, the earliest yet found. At roughly two million solar masses it was lighter than the early quasars, but it was strikingly heavy for so young and small a galaxy. It was one more object growing faster than the models allow.
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Jan 12, 2021
The record shifted again to quasar J0313-1806, whose light set out when the universe was only about 670 million years old. Its black hole already contained more than 1.6 billion times the sun's mass, too much for the familiar picture of a black hole growing from a single collapsed star. It hinted these giants may have started from unusually heavy seeds.
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Dec 6, 2017
A brighter and even more distant beacon appeared, the quasar ULAS J1342+0928, seen when the universe was roughly 690 million years old. Its black hole weighed close to 800 million suns and was shining inside a cosmos still half-filled with neutral hydrogen fog. The find pushed the mystery of fast early black hole growth further back in time.
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Jun 29, 2011
Astronomers found ULAS J1120+0641, a quasar blazing from just 770 million years after the Big Bang and, at the time, the most distant ever seen. Its central black hole already held about two billion times the mass of the sun. That was so large so early that researchers said they could not easily explain how it formed in the time available.
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