Published 14 hours ago • loading... • Updated 8 hours ago
NASA's Webb Reveals Black Hole Formed Before Its Galaxy
JWST spectroscopy shows the black hole holds about two-thirds of QSO1’s mass, leaving little room for stars and challenging standard growth models.
On Wednesday, May 27, 2026, researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope directly measured the mass of black hole Abell2744-QSO1, finding it weighs roughly 50 million solar masses and existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Previous indirect estimates placed QSO1 at around 40 million solar masses, but those techniques relied on assumptions from the local universe that astronomers questioned, fueling debate over how supermassive black holes formed so quickly.
Astronomers used spectroastrometry to map gas rotating around the black hole's center, discovering Keplerian motion that proves most mass concentrates in the black hole rather than distributed among stars.
The results suggest the black hole predates its host galaxy, outweighing the stars by thousands of times—what astronomers call a "naked" black hole, a classification that challenges standard formation models.
Europe's Extremely Large Telescope, coming online in the 2030s, may resolve whether these black holes formed from direct gas collapse or primordial seeds, helping astronomers understand the universe's most massive objects.