"Naked" Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe
Arnav Nilakanta '27
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has identified an unusually isolated supermassive black hole in the early universe with a mass of approximately 50 million suns named Abell2744-QSO1 (Juodzbalis, 2025). A black hole is an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational pull; “supermassive” black holes have masses that are far greater than that of our sun. (NASA, 2020)
Typically, supermassive black holes are found at the center of galaxies and grow over time. Many black holes are discovered through radiation detected from nearby gas and general matter as they spiral inward, heat up, and power the release of high-powered electromagnetic waves. This process is known as accretion, with the gas and matter coming from the black hole’s surrounding environment. (NASA, 2023). However, for the newly observed Abell2744-QSO1, there is no clear evidence of a surrounding galaxy. This makes it difficult to understand with our current scientific models and information (Wood, 2025). The JWST, which detected the black hole, can study such objects at extreme distances because cosmic expansion stretches their light to longer wavelengths, a phenomenon called redshift (European Space Agency). QSO1 has a redshift of z = 7.04, placing it in the so-called “epoch of reionization,” created when the first stars and galaxies changed the structure of the universe by ionizing hydrogen gas (UCLA Cosmology Group).
This black hole belongs to a group called “Little Red Dots,” which are small and very distant objects that appear red when observed with telescopes. These objects make up approximately one-sixth to one-third of active galaxies in the early universe (Juodzbalis, 2025). In addition, QSO1 appears brighter than it actually is because of gravitational lensing—a process in which a massive object closer to the observer bends and amplifies the light from an object in the background. This makes it easier to observe distant objects in detail (Juodzbalis, 2025). These observations of QSO1 were made using JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph, an instrument that breaks infrared light into different wavelengths across small areas of the image (NASA, 2025). Using this method, scientists can identify the chemicals that emit the detected light and predict the black hole’s motion.
In the aforementioned black hole, scientists analyzed how gas moved around the center of the object to estimate its mass (Juodzbalis, 2025). By measuring the speed of the gas at different distances from the center, they produced a rotation curve, showing how orbital speed changes with distance from the center. These speeds are determined using Doppler shifts, where motion causes light to shift in wavelength (NASA, 2025). The resulting data closely matched the motion expected around a single, extremely massive object, indicating the object was a central black hole with a mass of about 50 million suns (Juodzbalis, 2025). One solar mass is approximately 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, meaning the black hole’s total mass is roughly 1 x 1038 kilograms (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center).
The same analysis shows that a large host galaxy is highly unlikely. The authors estimate a black-hole-to-stellar-mass ratio of greater than two, leading to the fitting name of a “naked” black hole—one without a large galaxy surrounding it. (Juodžbalis et al., 2025; Wood, 2025) This differs significantly from nearby galaxies, where central black holes are usually a thousand times shorter than their host galaxies (Devlin, 2025). This suggests that this black hole either formed from a very large initial object (a collection of matter) or grew rapidly during the early stages of the universe (Wood, 2025). According to Quanta Magazine, this finding intensifies debates about how the first black holes formed, including whether some may have grown rapidly from massive early structures.
Beyond challenging existing theories, this discovery provides astronomers with a rare opportunity to study black hole formation in the early universe. Because the black hole (QSO1) is relatively isolated, it allows scientists to observe black hole growth without the complex interactions of the black hole with its large surrounding galaxy. Thus, QSO1 can help researchers better understand the physical processes that cause rapid mass accumulation in the early stages of the universe.
Overall, the discovery of Abell2744-QSO1 is significant because it challenges long-standing ideas about how the early universe was formed. Finding a massive, almost standalone black hole that formed soon after the Big Bang suggests that black holes may have been created earlier than scientists previously expected, perhaps even before galaxies. This discovery pushes researchers to reconsider the order in which astronomical objects formed after the Big Bang. Current models of galaxy formation and cosmic evolution may need to be revised to account for these unexpected early structures.
References
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/02/a-paradigm-change-black-hole-spotted -that-may-have-been-created-moments-after-big-bang
European Space Agency. (n.d.). Redshift. ESA/Hubble. https://esahubble.org/wordbank/redshift/ Juodžbalis, I., et al. (2025). A direct black hole mass measurement in a Little Red Dot at the epoch of reionization (arXiv:2508.21748). arXiv.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.21748
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2020, September 8). What are black holes? NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2023, March 31). Hubble views an intriguing active galaxy. NASA Science.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-views-an-intriguing-active-galaxy/ National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2025, September 10). Webb’s instruments. NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/instruments
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. (n.d.). Solar mass.
https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/solarMass.shtml
UCLA Cosmology Group. (n.d.). The cosmic dark ages, reionization, and the formation of the first galaxies. https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/REIONIZE.HTML
Wood, C. (2025, September 12). A single, ‘naked’ black hole rewrites the history of the universe.
Quanta Magazine.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-u niverse-20250912/