Supermassive black holes in 'little red dot' galaxies are 1,000 times larger than they should be, and astronomers don't know why

An illustration shows seven little red dot galaxies embedded in the cosmic web, one of which is dominated by a supermassive black hole.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered distant, overly massive supermassive black holes in the early universe. The black holes seem way too massive compared to the mass of the stars in the galaxies that host them.

In the modern universe, for galaxies close to our own Milky Way, supermassive black holes tend to have masses equal to around 0.01% of the stellar mass of their host galaxy. Thus, for every 10,000 solar masses attributed to stars in a galaxy, there is around one solar mass of a central supermassive black hole.