Supermassive black holes arise from cosmic seeds

A telescope suggests black holes grew from cosmic seeds
JWST suggests black holes grew from cosmic seeds. — Space/File
JWST suggests black holes grew from cosmic seeds. — Space/File

Discoveries in space have shown us surprising things about super big black holes at the centre of galaxies. They help make galaxies and stars, and maybe even dark matter. Nearly every galaxy has one. But how did they get so big so fast?

By using special telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found a way to see through the bright light of ancient quasars. Quasars are super bright because they come from super big black holes having lots of stuff in them. But they were so bright that they made it hard to see the galaxies around them.

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The scientists collected data from the JWST on six faraway quasars situated approximately 13 billion light-years away. They observed these quasars across different wavelengths and compared their light to model quasars, allowing them to distinguish between the light emitted by the compact core of the quasar and the more spread-out light from the surrounding galaxy. 

Through careful filtering to remove the intense quasar light, they successfully captured the initial images of the distant galaxies hosting these ancient quasars for the first time.

The study found something amazing that the black holes in these early galaxies were much bigger compared to their galaxies than we see in galaxies today. This means these black holes grew very fast when the universe was young. It's different from what scientists thought before, that galaxies formed first and then black holes.