A high black hole to host mass ratio in a lensed AGN in the early Universe. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38354833/)

These scientists used a powerful telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look at a new group of red objects in space that might be supermassive black holes growing in a way we didn't know about before. They found a very interesting red object in a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744 that looked like it was actually three images of the same thing, caused by something called strong lensing.

The scientists then used another instrument on the JWST called NIRSpec to take a closer look at this red object, which they named Abell2744-QSO1. They studied the light coming from this object and found out that it is a special type of supermassive black hole called an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) that is very far away, at a redshift of 7.0451.

By looking at the light from this object, the scientists could figure out that the black hole is growing very quickly and is already very massive compared to the galaxy it is in. This is different from what we usually see in galaxies closer to us. The scientists think that this object could be a link between the very first black holes and the bright quasars we see in the universe.

Furtak LJ., Labbe I., Zitrin A., Greene JE., Dayal P., Chemerynska I., Kokorev V., Miller TB., Goulding AD., Graaff A., Bezanson R., Brammer GB., Cutler SE., Leja J., Pan R., Price SH., Wang B., Weaver JR., Whitaker KE., Atek H., Bogdan A., Charlot S., Curtis-Lake E., Dokkum PV., Endsley R., Feldmann R., Fudamoto Y., Fujimoto S., Glazebrook K., Juneau S., Marchesini D., Maseda MV., Nelson E., Oesch PA., Plat A., Setton DJ., Stark DP., Williams CC. A high black hole to host mass ratio in a lensed AGN in the early Universe. Nature. 2024 Feb 14. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07184-8.