James Webb Found a Black Hole Growing Without a Galaxy — How Is This Possible?
Somewhere inside the data from a spectrograph aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, there is a plot that looks almost boring. Gas velocity on one axis. Distance from the center on the other. The curve it traces is one that any first-year physics student would recognize on sight, because it is the same shape you get when you plot the motion of the planets around our Sun. Fast on the inside. Slower as you move out. Clean, smooth, obedient to a law written down more than four centuries ago. The object that produced that curve sits more than thirteen billion light-years away. Its light left when the universe was roughly seven hundred million years old — about five percent of its present age. And when the team solved that curve for the mass sitting at the center, they got a number: roughly fifty million times the mass of the Sun. NASA Science That number, by itself, is not the strange part. Black holes of that size are common enough in the modern universe. The strange part is what t...