Giant black hole from the early Universe caught taking a “nap” after eating too much

Astronomers have captured a huge black hole in the early Universe “sleeping” after gorging itself on too much food.

A new study has revealed that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has identified a supermassive black hole in a dormant state, formed just 800 million years after the Big Bang.

According to , with a mass equivalent to 400 million times that of the Sun, the black hole is the largest detected in the early Universe by JWST. The object draws attention for its colossal size, but also for its inactivityas it consumes gas at a very slow rate – about one hundredth of the maximum limit for its power capacity.

Normally, supermassive black holes grow by feeding on gas and dust, producing intense light emission due to friction in the accretion disk.

However, this sleeping giant was detected even without emitting light signalsthanks to its enormous gravitational influence. “Even though it was dormant, its enormous mass made detection possible,” explained Ignas Juodžbalis of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute of Cosmology. “Dormancy also allowed us to learn more about the mass of its host galaxy.”

According to the team, the black hole has a mass equivalent to 40% of the mass of its host galaxy, a marked contrast to the black holes in the current Universe, which represent about 0.1% of the mass of their galaxies.

The origin of such massive black holes so soon after the Big Bang remains a mystery, but scientists hypothesize that they may have been born very large or have undergone periods of hyperactivity followed by long phases of dormancy.

Astronomers believe that during these periods of “supercharging” or super-Eddington accretion, black holes could grow rapidly, falling asleep in “naps” that can last hundreds of millions of years.

This discovery, which was published in Naturesuggests that many other similar black holes may be hidden in the early Universe, although their dormant nature makes detection very difficult.