JWST just found a 50‑million‑solar‑mass black hole 750 million years after the Big Bang, with no galaxy around it. That’s not supposed to happen under the standard “stars → galaxies → black holes” model.
It’s pure hydrogen, so it formed before nearby stars had time to seed heavier elements. That leaves a few options: primordial black hole from the Big Bang, direct collapse of a gas cloud, or a galaxy that formed and disappeared.
There are ~300 similar “little red dots” in JWST data. If most are black holes, the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies. Either way, the neat timeline in textbooks is wrong.
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation.
Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all).
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
If planet X exists and is a planetary mass PBH it could unlock the universe in many ways. We could use it as a gravitational slingshot to fire probes at significant fractions of the speed of light out for flyby surveys of other solar systems.
It’s hard to visualize how weird and extreme black holes are.
A black hole with the mass of the Moon would be smaller than a BB but would have the mass and inertia of the Moon. It would be basically immovable as far as we are concerned. Chuck stuff at it all day and its trajectory change would be so small we probably wouldn’t be able to measure it.
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms?
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
If you draw conclusions from incomplete data, they tend to be wrong. Even Prof. van Dusen and Sherlock Holmes knew that. So if there were any difference, it would be sheer luck.
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no?
as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape.
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
Being charged and or rotating changes the dynamics of where the event horizon is in interesting ways, If I understand it correctly it forms a sort of shell where you have two event horizons one inside the other. and the theory being that if enough energy(charge and/or rotational) is present the two event horizons will meet leaving your naked singularity. Nice and neat, the main problem being the absurd amount of energy required.
My personal area of fascination is the time dilation around a black hole. One of those things I assume them who actually study the things(astrophysicists) take into consideration but I almost never see in the popular press. If I understand it correctly, as you fly into a black hole, nice and neat right, will see the rest of the universe quickly age and die before you reach the event horizon. If Hawking radiation is a thing you may see the black hole evaporate in front of you before you can reach it.
No one ever shows the math anywhere. They just write that it is hard, or that it doesnt work.
It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion.
On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not.
So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science".
Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore.
Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal.
Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...
> Although theory predicts that microscopic black holes decay rapidly, even hypothetical stable black holes can be shown to be harmless by studying the consequences of their production by cosmic rays.
I believe a healthy dose of humility would be in order.
I definitely feel like the timeline we're in has gotten worse and worse since the LHC fired up. Pretty soon all the ones that aren't apocalyptic are gonna be eaten up by black holes.
the math is written out all the time, pick up decent grad level GR and QM textbooks and the tensor equations will be right there for you. the fact you don't understand the math isn't the fault of the evil physicists
The math relevant to OP is accessible via the second link in the text: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748 I guess you might have to follow some citations too. But we were on a tangent about white holes, which would be unreasonable to expect in the article. I and the other reply have already told you where to find that math.
blackholes are "wormholes" across "the multiverse" but the multiverse is the historical multi-branch (i.e. non-deterministic) VersionControlSystem history of the physical evolution of whatever is "the ground of the ground (...of the ground of the ...)" all the way to the bottom (turtles is not an accepted answer unless you "speak reptilian")
JWST just found a 50‑million‑solar‑mass black hole 750 million years after the Big Bang, with no galaxy around it. That’s not supposed to happen under the standard “stars → galaxies → black holes” model.
It’s pure hydrogen, so it formed before nearby stars had time to seed heavier elements. That leaves a few options: primordial black hole from the Big Bang, direct collapse of a gas cloud, or a galaxy that formed and disappeared.
There are ~300 similar “little red dots” in JWST data. If most are black holes, the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies. Either way, the neat timeline in textbooks is wrong.
> the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies
Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.
[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 (187 points | 3 months ago | 180 comments)
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
> It’s pure hydrogen
The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all).
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
that doesn't work out. from the spectra we're seeing hydrogen spikes red shifted, so the lack of any other spikes is very strong evidence
!
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
If planet X exists and is a planetary mass PBH it could unlock the universe in many ways. We could use it as a gravitational slingshot to fire probes at significant fractions of the speed of light out for flyby surveys of other solar systems.
It would make a better slingshot than a planet of the same mass?
yes. you can get a lot closer to it.
Probably a dumb question but at those energies would we be risking de-orbiting the black hole with such a maneuver?
No, for the same reason slingshotting on a planetary body now has no significant effect on it. The mass difference is too enormous.
It’s hard to visualize how weird and extreme black holes are.
A black hole with the mass of the Moon would be smaller than a BB but would have the mass and inertia of the Moon. It would be basically immovable as far as we are concerned. Chuck stuff at it all day and its trajectory change would be so small we probably wouldn’t be able to measure it.
no. if it has the mass of a planet, it has the inertia of a planet
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms?
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
> Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable.
Radioactive elements excepted, of course.
And when they get struck by ionizing photons.
So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
Radioactive atoms are just unstable atoms shedding energy to until they fall into a stable atom state.
It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
To be fair, everything is stable if we restrict ourselves to their stable subsets.
Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!
Was it wrong, or based on incomplete data?
In most fields it's impossible to have complete data.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
If you draw conclusions from incomplete data, they tend to be wrong. Even Prof. van Dusen and Sherlock Holmes knew that. So if there were any difference, it would be sheer luck.
Both at the same time? Weird question.
Thanks , very helpful.
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
Bug fixes:
- Corrected an infrequent issue with getResultingProtonCount that would cause it to always return 1 for certain origin bodies.
(In the merge request comments: "This why we don't let junior devs commit unreviewed code to critical branches, guys.")
N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.
The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.
I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no?
If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.
> The scientists found that bright material — likely hot gas — swirled around in a furious vortex, one that backed up Furtak’s preliminary findings.
Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?
as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.
Naive outsider here...
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
[1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
I thought a naked singularity was a white hole, one without an event horizon. And physicists hate that idea, but expect to never find one anyway.
Note that the article doesn't call it a naked singularity.
I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape.
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
Being charged and or rotating changes the dynamics of where the event horizon is in interesting ways, If I understand it correctly it forms a sort of shell where you have two event horizons one inside the other. and the theory being that if enough energy(charge and/or rotational) is present the two event horizons will meet leaving your naked singularity. Nice and neat, the main problem being the absurd amount of energy required.
My personal area of fascination is the time dilation around a black hole. One of those things I assume them who actually study the things(astrophysicists) take into consideration but I almost never see in the popular press. If I understand it correctly, as you fly into a black hole, nice and neat right, will see the rest of the universe quickly age and die before you reach the event horizon. If Hawking radiation is a thing you may see the black hole evaporate in front of you before you can reach it.
> A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach
Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
IIRC the math is in fact very similar if not identical between a white hole and the Big Bang. But I don't actually know the math, so...
No one ever shows the math anywhere. They just write that it is hard, or that it doesnt work.
It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion.
On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not. So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science".
Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore.
Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal.
Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...
You are in no position to throw accusations considering the amount of misinformation you are spreading.
You could have spent two minutes to find out the actual arguments from scientists regarding the safety of the LHC, but chose not to.
Here it is: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider...
> Although theory predicts that microscopic black holes decay rapidly, even hypothetical stable black holes can be shown to be harmless by studying the consequences of their production by cosmic rays.
I believe a healthy dose of humility would be in order.
I definitely feel like the timeline we're in has gotten worse and worse since the LHC fired up. Pretty soon all the ones that aren't apocalyptic are gonna be eaten up by black holes.
the math is written out all the time, pick up decent grad level GR and QM textbooks and the tensor equations will be right there for you. the fact you don't understand the math isn't the fault of the evil physicists
Ah right personal attacks because I wrote that the quality of those articles is low. Apparently I dont understand the math...
Where is the math in the article? Barely anything.
Do you even have a Putnam?
The math relevant to OP is accessible via the second link in the text: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748 I guess you might have to follow some citations too. But we were on a tangent about white holes, which would be unreasonable to expect in the article. I and the other reply have already told you where to find that math.
The hell are you even talking about? You won't get a rebuttal because you haven't even said anything to rebut.
If you want to see the actual math, go read textbooks on general relativity and cosmology.
”By reconstructing the vortex, the team directly measured the mass of the object it was orbiting: 50 million times more massive than our sun.”
Is that not an indirect measurement?
It is the most direct measurement that astronomers have. That said, I do agree that the word "directly" should not have been in that sentence.
Even scales measure indirectly.
Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?
Am I the only one to see HALs eye here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
blackholes are "wormholes" across "the multiverse" but the multiverse is the historical multi-branch (i.e. non-deterministic) VersionControlSystem history of the physical evolution of whatever is "the ground of the ground (...of the ground of the ...)" all the way to the bottom (turtles is not an accepted answer unless you "speak reptilian")