James Webb Telescope Finds Three Black Holes Inside One Ancient Galaxy
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered three simultaneously active supermassive black holes inside a single galaxy located over 12.5 billion light-years away, just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang.
A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has reported the discovery of three co-existing active supermassive black holes inside galaxy J0148-4214, which lies more than 12.5 billion light-years from Earth at a redshift of z=5.02 — meaning we observe it as it existed roughly 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery was made using the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec integral field spectrograph, which detected distinct hydrogen emission signatures pointing to three separate actively feeding black holes rather than one. Two of the black holes sit near the galactic centre, separated by just 620 light-years, while the third lies approximately 5,500 light-years outward. Their estimated masses are 80 million solar masses (the largest), 2 million solar masses, and 600,000 solar masses (the smallest). Notably, the smallest black hole — at just 600,000 solar masses — is accumulating matter far faster than theoretical models predict, exceeding the Eddington limit and suggesting an unusual early-universe growth mechanism. The two central black holes are expected to merge within the next few hundred million years. The finding was published in the journal Astronomy and helps explain how supermassive black holes grew so large so quickly in the early cosmos.
