Newborn Supermassive Black Hole Discovery Could Rewrite Cosmic History

Galaxy Collision Fuels Rapid Black Hole Growth

Astronomers may have witnessed the birth of a supermassive black hole, a finding that could revolutionize our understanding of how these cosmic giants form and evolve throughout the universe’s history.

Anomalous Galaxy Reveals Its Secret

The potential discovery centers on a distant galaxy nicknamed the “Infinity Galaxy,” located approximately 8 billion light-years away. Its unusual, figure-eight shape is thought to be the result of a recent galactic collision. Researchers analyzed data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with radio observations from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, to investigate this peculiar celestial object.

Unusual Location and Formation

“Everything is unusual about this galaxy,” stated **Pieter van Dokkum** of Yale University, who spearheaded the research. “Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s accreting a lot of material.” The most baffling aspect was the black hole’s position: situated between the cores of the two merging galaxies, rather than within either one.

Initial analysis of Webb data suggests the black hole’s velocity closely matches that of the surrounding gas cloud. This similarity points to a recent formation, likely within the last 50 million years, directly from the gas compressed during the galactic merger. “This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot that then collapsed into a black hole,” explained **van Dokkum**.

Challenging Existing Theories

This discovery could offer crucial insights into why the James Webb Space Telescope has detected massive black holes existing surprisingly early in the universe’s timeline, not long after the Big Bang. Current theories, such as the “light seeds” model, propose that supermassive black holes start small from collapsed stars and grow over billions of years. However, the rapid growth observed in early galaxies challenges this idea.

The “heavy seeds” theory suggests a faster formation route through the direct collapse of massive gas clouds. “This black hole would have formed over five billion years after the Big Bang, much later than UHZ1,” noted astrophysicist **Priyamvada Natarajan**, a co-author on the study, referencing an earlier discovery of a black hole in the galaxy UHZ1. “So, what is exciting about the discovery of the Infinity Galaxy is that it hints that nature likely makes black holes via direct collapse throughout cosmic time.”

This finding implies that the extreme conditions necessary for rapid black hole formation may persist more recently than previously thought. The universe’s most massive galaxies today also host supermassive black holes at their centers, like Sagittarius A* in our own Milky Way. These central black holes are believed to influence their host galaxies’ evolution. For context, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center is estimated to be about 4 million times the mass of our Sun, demonstrating the immense scale of these objects.

The study, submitted for publication, offers compelling evidence that nature may continuously form black holes through direct collapse across cosmic epochs, not just in the universe’s infancy. The research is detailed in a paper available at ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250615619V/abstract.