Far Back in Time: Oldest Black Hole in The Universe Found

A team of astronomers says it has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed.

Artist's representation of the 'Little Red Dot' | Erik Zumalt / University of Texas at Austin

It's a cosmic heavyweight that formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 3 percent of its current age, reports Space.com.

It's the most distant - and by extension earliest - black hole ever seen. Located in the galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9, the supermassive black hole likely formed 13.3 billion years ago. But recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mean we could find many similar black holes lurking inside so-called Little Red Dots, or LRDs, says Popular Science. "When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go," says Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the discovery. "We're really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect."

The black hole belongs to a mysterious class of compact, early galaxies dubbed Little Red Dots for their intensely bright red appearance in telescope images. These galaxies have been found only within the first 1.5 billion years of cosmic history and have puzzled astronomers since the JWST's first observations of them. Indeed, the discovery sets a new benchmark for how early supermassive black holes can form and raises questions about their origin and growth.

Typically, a very high level of brightness would suggest a galaxy teeming with stars - but according to galaxy evolution models, galaxies this early in the universe's history shouldn't have had enough time to form the number of stars needed to account for the brightness observed in the Little Red Dots. This contradiction led researchers to consider an alternative source of the brightness: black holes, which can shine intensely as they consume matter and release vast amounts of energy.

The newly discovered black hole is estimated to weigh up to 300 million times the mass of our sun, equivalent to nearly half the mass of all the stars in the black hole's host galaxy. Even by the standards of supermassive black holes, that's colossal, astronomers say.