Astronomers used JWST to look at how one of the most distant supermassive black holes feeds itself and found it looked normal.
Artist's impression of a quasar core. Quasars are powered by interactions between supermassive black holes and their accretion disks at the hearts of galaxies. JWST observed one in infrared light to reveal its feeding mechanism. Courtesy T. Mueller/MPIA.
Today we see SMBH in galaxies that can have upwards of millions or billions of solar masses sequestered away. Astronomers naturally assumed that it took a long time for such monsters to build up. Like billions of years. So, when JWST observed, they expected to see an active galactic nucleus as it looked some 770 million years after the Big Bang. That is, they expected a still-growing central supermassive black hole. They were intrigued to find that it had a mass of at least a billion suns.
That raised a question: how could such an early SMBH get so big so fast? For something that young, having that much mass says something about its feeding mechanism. Astronomers already know that SMBH existed early in cosmic time. These structures at the hearts of those distant quasars apparently already existed when the Universe was very young—about 5% of its current age.The growth of SMBH in the early Universe is a hot topic these days.
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