NASA’s Webb Reveals Black Hole That Formed Before Its Galaxy

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.

NASA’s Webb Reveals Black Hole That Formed Before Its Galaxy. Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. An image from NIRCam on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster). But it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds. Now, researchers, including several from The University of Texas at Austin, have used NASA’s James Webb Space Teles...