A 13.3 billion-year-old black hole—the most distant ever discovered—has been observed by an international team of astronomers, providing new insights into the early universe.
The observations, made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope, offer a window to a period in cosmic history just 500 million years following the Big Bang, revealing new perspectives on a recently discovered class of galaxies called “Little Red Dots.”
CAPERS-LRD-z9 is the galaxy hosting the black hole, located so far away that the light now reaching Earth is from a time when the universe was only 3% of its current age. Viewing this remote period, so close to the universe’s origins, allows astronomers to gather new data on the structure of the early cosmos and its evolution.
James Webb Space Telescope Sees the Past
“When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go. We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,” said lead author Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center.
“While astronomers have found a few, more distant candidates,” added Steven Finkelstein, a co-author on the paper and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center, “they have yet to find the distinct spectroscopic signature associated with a black hole.”
Spectroscopy is a technique employed by astronomers to separate different wavelengths of light and, from those single wavelengths, understand an object’s properties. The unusual effects of black holes on gases allow scientists to locate their presence through spectroscopy. When gases circle the event horizon before falling in, the light moving away from the Earth stretches to a redder wavelength while the light moving in our direction compresses to a bluer wavelength.
“There aren’t many other things that create this signature,” explained Taylor. “And this galaxy has it!”
A New Class of Galaxy
The discovery came from data collected by the CAPERS project aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb has consistently offered the farthest observations and crucial spectroscopy data since its 2021 launch, with CAPERS representing the outermost edge of its observational field.
“The first goal of CAPERS is to confirm and study the most distant galaxies,” said co-author Mark Dickinson, the CAPERS team lead. “JWST spectroscopy is the key to confirming their distances and understanding their physical properties.”
Astronomers only perceived CAPERS-LRD-z9 as a usual speck in the CAPERS imagery before eventually identifying it as belonging to a new class of galaxies termed “Little Red Dots.” Their name is self-explanatory; the galaxies appear as tiny red dots, yet of tremendous brilliance, and only exist within the universe’s first 1.5 billion years.
“The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early JWST data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope,” explained Finkelstein. “Now, we’re in the process of figuring out what they’re like and how they came to be.”
Black Hole Brilliance
The researchers suspect that data from CAPERS-LRD-z9 will be a key piece of the puzzle. Observations align with other evidence suggesting that supermassive black holes may power the extraordinary brightness of Little Red Dots. That luminosity is particularly surprising, as such brilliance typically signals a dense concentration of stars—yet these galaxies formed too early for most stars to have developed. Instead, the team believes the intense light and energy are generated by matter being consumed by black holes.
Beyond just the brightness of these tiny galaxies, researchers suggest that CAPERS-LRD-z9 observations may reveal important information about the galaxies’ red color. Clouds of gas surrounding black holes have previously been observed to appear redshifted due to the strong gravitational effects exerted by them.
“We’ve seen these clouds in other galaxies,” explained Taylor. “When we compared this object to those other sources, it was a dead ringer.”
The central black hole is enormous, weighing in at 300 million solar masses, which is half the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. Observations of such a massive black hole at such an early period will allow astronomers new insight into the object’s evolution, as there would be far less opportunity to grow to such a size.
“This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,” said Finkelstein. “Or they started out far more massive than our models predict.”
“This is a good test object for us,” said Taylor. “We haven’t been able to study early black hole evolution until recently, and we are excited to see what we can learn from this unique object.”
The paper, “CAPERS-LRD-z9: A Gas-enshrouded Little Red Dot Hosting a Broad-line Active Galactic Nucleus at z = 9.288,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 6, 2025.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.