Stars, supernovae, black holes and stellar remnants

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Astronomers Discover the Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed
The ancient behemoth was present just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
By Ellyn Lapointe Published August 7, 2025 |

An international team of astronomers has identified the earliest black hole ever confirmed, an ancient behemoth that existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery could offer new clues to a mysterious class of ancient galaxies that confounded prevailing theories of cosmology.

In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers describe CAPERS-LRD-z9—a distant, gas-enshrouded galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. It dates back some 13.3 billion years, a point when the universe was just 3% of its current age. Spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, CAPERS-LRD-z9 is one of many “little red dot” galaxies—these strange bodies began popping up in Webb imagery within the first year of the telescope’s mission.

“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,” Steven Finkelstein, co-author of the new study and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a press release. “Now, we’re in the process of figuring out what they’re like and how they came to be.”

https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-discove ... 2000640061

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Most Distant Black Hole Ever Confirmed From 500 Million Years After the Big Bang
By Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
August 6, 2025

Introduction:

(IFL Science) The advent of JWST has revolutionized our understanding of the earliest universe. Its keen infrared eye has pushed the boundaries of how far we can see into the universe, and due to the finiteness of the speed of light, that means how far we can look into the past. We are now studying the earliest hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, and researchers have confirmed the most distant known black hole in the universe.

The cosmic object sits at the core of galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9 and was already there 500 million years after the Big Bang – that’s just 3 percent of the universe's current age. The team used JWST's spectroscopic capabilities to find the undeniable presence of a black hole. While hints of earlier black holes have been observed, this is the earliest and so the most distant confirmed.

"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," lead author Dr Anthony Taylor, from The University of Texas at Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center, said in a statement.

Additional extract:

There is another issue with this galaxy: the size of its black hole. It is estimated to be up to 300 million times the mass of the Sun. Our galaxy's supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun, and it has had 13.8 billion years to grow to that size. How the one inside CAPERS-LRD-z9 bulked up to its incredible size is unknown.

"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."

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/most-distan ... ng-8043

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Astronomers Just Saw a Gamma-Ray Explosion Defy All Known Space Logic
By Michele Starr
September 12, 2025

Introduction:

(Science Alert) A giant explosion that lit up the sky didn't just rock the cosmos – it absolutely rattled our understanding of the Universe's most powerful outbursts.

The gamma-ray burst (GRB) recorded on 2 July 2025 is the longest of its kind ever observed, lasting about a day. By comparison, GRBs normally last on the scale of milliseconds to minutes at most.

Moreover, it did something astronomers have never seen a GRB do before: it appears to have repeated. This can't be neatly explained by our current models for what causes them.

"This event is unlike any other seen in 50 years of GRB observations," says astrophysicist Antonio Martin-Carrillo of University College Dublin.

"GRBs are catastrophic events so they are expected to go off just once because the source that produced them does not survive the dramatic explosion.
This event baffled us not only because it showed repeated powerful activity but also because it seemed to be periodic, which has never been seen before."

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/astronome ... ace-logic

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Mysterious ‘Red Dots’ in Early Universe May be ‘Black Hole Star’ Atmospheres
September 12, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tiny red objects spotted by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are offering scientists new insights into the origins of galaxies in the universe — and may represent an entirely new class of celestial object: a black hole swallowing massive amounts of matter and spitting out light.

Using the first datasets released by the telescope in 2022, an international team of scientists including Penn State researchers discovered mysterious “little red dots.” The researchers suggested the objects may be galaxies that were as mature as our current Milky Way, which is roughly 13.6 billion years old, just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Informally dubbed “universe breakers” by the team, the objects were originally thought to be galaxies far older than anyone expected in the infant universe — calling into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation.

Now, in a paper published today (Sept. 12) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the international team of astronomers and physicists, including those at Penn State, suggest that the dots may not be galaxies but an entirely new type of object: a black hole star.

They said their analysis indicates that the tiny pinpoints of light may be giant spheres of hot gas that are so dense they look like the atmospheres of typical nuclear fusion-powered stars; however, instead of fusion, they are powered by supermassive black holes in their center that rapidly pull in matter, converting it into energy and giving off light.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1098051

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Researchers Uncover How Galaxies and Their Black Holes Grew 12.9 Billion Light Years Ago
September 18, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) An international of researchers including the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI) have used the James Webb Space Telescope to uncover 12 black holes from 12.9 billion years ago, shedding light on how black holes and galaxies evolved in the early universe, reports a new study in Nature Astronomy.

Since the release of its first data in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made it possible for researchers to study extremely distant galaxies, reshaping our understanding of the formation and evolution of the first galaxies in the universe.

At the center of a galaxy is a supermassive blackhole weighing between a hundred-thousand to several hundred billion times the mass of the Sun. When a black hole shines brightly, it is called a quasar because it is emitting the energy of matter falling into the black hole. Quasars allow researchers to identify galaxies in the vast night sky, which they study to learn about how galaxies have evolved into the shapes and behavior we see today.

Observations of galaxies close to the Earth have shown a strong link between the mass of the galaxy and its central black hole, indicating that the two grow in tandem and influence each other over cosmic time—a process known as co-evolution. However, it is unclear how this relationship between the two, whose sizes differ by orders of magnitude, has been shaped. The only way to know for sure is to study galaxies far in the distant universe when the universe was young.

A team…studied quasars J2236+0032 and J1512+4422 using JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). These quasars had been discovered through the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP), a wide-field imaging survey at the Subaru Telescope, and were among the targets followed up in JWST’s first year of science operations.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1098810

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Exceptional star is the most pristine object known in the universe

A star found in the Large Magellanic Cloud is remarkably unpolluted by heavier elements, suggesting it is descended from the universe’s earliest stars

By Alex Wilkins
3 October 2025

A relatively nearby star that appears to lack almost any of the heavy elements produced by supernovae could be a direct descendant of the very first stars that formed in the universe.

Astronomers think the first stars were made up of only the hydrogen and helium that were floating around after the big bang. It was only when these stars ran out of fuel and exploded in a supernova that elements heavier than helium were spread around. The leftover, element-rich gas from these initial explosions then formed the next generation of stars, with the cycle repeating to eventually produce all the elements we see in the stars and planets today.

Most of the stars we see in our galaxy are many generations removed from this initial population of stars, but some astronomers dubbed “stellar archaeologists” have found stars that are nearly pristine. They are thought to be “second generation” stars, born from the remains of the very earliest stars.

Now, Alexander Ji at the University of Chicago and his colleagues have found a star that has the lowest total amount of “metals” – which to astronomers means all elements other than hydrogen or helium – in the known universe. The star, called SDSS J0715-7334, is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and has a metal content of about 0.8 parts per million, which is about 20,000 times less than our sun.

After first spotting the star in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey due to its unusually low metallicity, Ji and his colleagues then observed it with the Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. They found that the star contains extremely low amounts of iron, comparable to those seen in other nearly pristine stars. However, they found it also has extremely low amounts of carbon, at levels we don’t see in stars from the Milky Way.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/24 ... -universe/



The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, where the near-pristine star SDSS J0715-7334 was spotted
Josh Lake/NASA/ESA

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Event Horizon Telescope images reveal new dark matter detection method

by Tejasri Gururaj, Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-event-hor ... eveal.html

According to a new Physical Review Letters study, black holes could help solve the dark matter mystery. The shadowy regions in black hole images captured by the Event Horizon Telescope can act as ultra-sensitive detectors for the invisible material that makes up most of the universe's matter.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85% of the universe's matter, but scientists still don't know what it actually is. While researchers have proposed countless ways to detect it, this study introduces black hole imaging as a fresh detection method—one that comes with some distinct benefits.

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Image of two black holes circling each other captured for the first time
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-image-bla ... tured.html
by University of Turku

For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other. The observation confirmed the existence of black hole pairs. In the past, astronomers have only managed to image individual black holes.

An international team of researchers has succeeded in imaging two black holes orbiting each other at the center of a quasar called OJ287. Quasars are extremely bright galactic cores, whose light is produced when a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy devours the cosmic gas and dust around it.

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New telescope opens window to southern sky
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-telescope ... n-sky.html
by Sarah Collins, University of Cambridge

A powerful new telescope has captured its first glimpse of the cosmos, and could transform our understanding of how stars, galaxies and black holes evolve.

The 4MOST (4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope), mounted on the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope in Chile, achieved its 'first light' on 18 October 2025: a milestone marking the start of its scientific mission.

Unlike a typical telescope that takes pictures of the sky, 4MOST records spectra—the detailed colors of light from celestial objects—revealing their temperature, motion and chemical makeup. Using 2,436 optical fibers, each thinner than a human hair, the telescope can study thousands of stars and galaxies at once, splitting their light into 18,000 distinct color components.

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