The James Webb telescope keeps finding supermassive black holes in the infant universe so large that a few appear to outweigh every star in their host galaxy combined, a ratio the standard picture of how these giants grew cannot easily explain

The James Webb telescope keeps finding supermassive black holes in the infant universe so large that a few appear to outweigh every star in their host galaxy combined, a ratio the standard picture of how these giants grew cannot easily explain

Between 2019 and 2022, astronomers managed something that had never been done: they took two direct images of the region immediately around a black hole. The first, released in April 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, showed a lopsided ring of light circling the giant at the centre of the galaxy M87, an object with a mass about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The second, released in May 2022, showed the far smaller black hole …