NASA's Webb Reveals Black Hole Formed Before Its Galaxy
Webb’s gas-velocity map shows the black hole holds about two-thirds of QSO1’s mass, challenging standard galaxy 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.
44 Articles
44 Articles
Webb reveals black hole that formed before its galaxy
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don't know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.
Scientists Found a Black Hole That Breaks The Rules of Astrophysics
"It’s a paradigm shift, a total revisiting of the classical scenarios.” ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.
James Webb Space Telescope discovers a black hole that formed before its host galaxy. Scientists aren't sure how
Observations of "Little Red Dot" ancient galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope could answer the question: which comes first, the black hole or its galaxy? The shocking answer could represent a complete paradigm shift.
The new discovery from the James Webb has astonished astronomers.
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