Astronomers spotted CAPERS-LRD-z9, a tiny but ridiculously bright galaxy hiding a supermassive black hole that’s 300 million times the size of our Sun. And it was like they were looking back in time—13 billion years, to be exact.
This thing formed when the primitive universe was barely 500 million years old. For scale, that’s like finding a fully grown oak tree in the middle of a field just days after planting the acorn. It shouldn’t be there… and yet, there it is.
The galaxy is part of the CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey (CAPERS), and the discovery just made it into the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team behind it, led by Anthony J. Taylor with co-author Steven L. Finkelstein, used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its NIRSpec spectroscopy instrument. That’s how they saw gas swirling around the black hole at thousands of kilometers per second—the kind of movement you only get when matter is being devoured.
And CAPERS-LRD-z9 isn’t just any galaxy. It’s one of the so-called Little Red Dots (LRDs), compact galaxies that glow with red light and are so small you could mistake them for stars. We’ve only started finding them thanks to JWST, and we still don’t fully know why they look or behave the way they do. This one just happens to be harboring a black hole that’s rewriting our idea of how compact galaxies and their monsters in the middle grow up.
A galaxy older than… nearly everything
The light from CAPERS-LRD-z9 started its journey when the first galaxies were just beginning to form. By the time it reached JWST, it carried information from an era when space was still young and chaotic.
Using NIRSpec spectroscopy, the team split that ancient light into its component colors. What they found was gas moving up to 3,000 km/s—way too fast for anything except a black hole’s gravity. It’s a snapshot of the primitive universe at work, showing us that massive black holes were already fully formed shockingly early in cosmic history.
The puzzle of the “Little Red Dots”
The nickname Little Red Dots (LRDs) sounds cute, but the science is wild. These are tiny galaxies, glowing red in JWST’s images, and yet they shine much brighter than they should. CAPERS-LRD-z9 adds a twist: its brightness might be powered partly by that giant black hole feeding at its center.
That raises big questions. How does a galaxy so small, so early in time, manage to grow a black hole so massive? Did it start with an unusually big “seed” black hole? Or did it feed at a rate we didn’t think was possible? Either way, our models for how compact galaxies evolve might need a serious update.
Finding CAPERS-LRD-z9 is yet again another incredible scientific discovery
Finding this galaxy so soon in JWST’s mission suggests there could be many more ancient black holes out there—maybe even older, bigger ones. As Steven L. Finkelstein points out, JWST has only looked at a tiny piece of the sky so far.
Every one of these finds forces us to rethink the timeline of the primitive universe. It’s not just about galaxies—it’s about how quickly the universe built its most extreme objects. If black holes this big already existed half a billion years after the Big Bang, we may be missing key chapters in our cosmic story.
Astronomers are making more and more discoveries that are revolutionizing science, and although there’s still mystery out there, whatever there is to find, will be found. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that today’s tools like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are capable of spotting things even in the most remote places.