While peering into the early universe with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers keep finding monster black holes that seem to be growing too big, too fast for cosmological models to explain. Now, new observations of an exceptionally ravenous, rule-breaking object could help reveal why.
Using JWST to get a closer look at ancient galaxies known to host intense, X-ray emitting objects, researchers uncovered evidence of a supermassive black hole that appears to be gobbling up matter at more than 40 times its theoretical limit. Named LID-568 and observed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the object has been dubbed the fastest-feeding black hole in the early universe.
