Gargantuan black hole may be a remnant from the dawn of t...

What’s Happening

Not gonna lie, Astronomers were puzzled by a black hole around 50 million times the mass of the sun with no stars, spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope – now simulations suggest it could be a primordial black hole, something we have never seen before Space Gargantuan black hole may be a remnant from the dawn of the universe Astronomers were puzzled by a black hole around 50 million times the mass of the sun with no stars, spotted Webb Space Telescope – now simulations suggest it could be a primordial black hole, something we have never seen before By Alex Wilkins 2 January 2026 Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email Primordial black holes are hypothesised to have formed shortly after the big bang /Mohd.

Afuza An unusually massive black hole in the early universe may be a kind of exotic, star-less black hole first theorised . In August, Boyuan Liu at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues spotted a strange galaxy from 13 billion years ago, called Abell 2744-QSO1, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). (we’re not making this up)

The galaxy appeared to host an enormous black hole, around 50 million times the mass of the sun, but it was almost entirely devoid of stars.

The Details

Do black holes exist and, if not, what have we fr been looking at? “This is a puzzle, because the traditional theory says that you form stars first, or together with black holes,” says Liu.

Black holes are typically thought to form from massive stars when they run out of fuel and collapse. Liu and his team ran some basic simulations, which showed that QSO1 could have instead kicked off out as a primordial black hole , an exotic object first put forward Hawking and Bernard Carr in 1974.

Why This Matters

Rather than forming from a star, these objects would have coalesced out of fluctuations in the universe’s density shortly after the big bang. Primordial black holes should have largely evaporated and disappeared we can see back to with JWST, but there is a chance that some may have survived and grown into much larger black holes, like QSO1. Free to Launchpad Bring the galaxy to your inbox every month, with the latest space news, launches and astronomical occurrences from New Scientist’s Leah Crane.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

Free to Launchpad Bring the galaxy to your inbox every month, with the latest space news, launches and astronomical occurrences from New Scientist’s Leah Crane.

Thoughts? Drop them below.