{"id":1004202,"date":"2026-06-04T05:34:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T05:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1004202\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T05:34:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T05:34:15","slug":"cambridge-researchers-settle-astronomical-version-of-chicken-or-the-egg-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1004202\/","title":{"rendered":"Cambridge researchers settle astronomical version of \u2018chicken or the egg\u2019 debate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s the astronomical equivalent of the chicken or the egg debate: which comes first – the galaxy or the black hole?<\/p>\n

The answer has evaded researchers for decades – but new findings, described as \u201cremarkable\u201d have shone a light on the darkest reaches of the universe.<\/p>\n

\"ImageImage of Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster) and Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1, captured by Webb\u2019s NIRCam. Picture: NASA, ESA, CSA, Lukas Furtak (Ben-Gurion University); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)<\/p>\n

We know that when large stars within existing galaxies consume their fuel, they collapse to form black holes, which gobble up surrounding material and then merge with one another over time to form supermassive black holes.<\/p>\n

But thousands of black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun have been detected in the early universe, leaving astronomers baffled as to how they formed from such small seeds.<\/p>\n

Now an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge<\/a> have used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect clear observational evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning.<\/p>\n

They formed without going through a stellar collapse phase – and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a remarkable finding,\u201d said Prof Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge\u2019s Cavendish Laboratory<\/a> and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, co-author of two studies published in Nature and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. \u201cIt\u2019s a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

They discovered this using detailed observations of a prototypical Little Red Dot – crimson dots that appear in images of the early universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

This one – Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1) – existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang and is more than 13 billion light years away and only 1,300 light years across.<\/p>\n

But it is magnified and appears in three different locations in the sky because it is \u2018gravitationally lensed\u2019 by a galaxy cluster called Pandora\u2019s Cluster, making it easier to study.<\/p>\n

QSO1 was believed to be a cloud of glowing hydrogen and helium gas, circling a supermassive black hole, although there was doubt over the black hole\u2019s size.<\/p>\n

The researchers used instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> to trace the effects of the black hole\u2019s gravity on the gas swirling around it, while also mapping the distribution of various elements in the gas.<\/p>\n

They found that the gas has Keplerian rotation, meaning it orbits a central point in the same way that planets in our solar system orbit the Sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is important because it tells us that most of the mass of QSO1 is concentrated in the black hole at the centre. If the mass were more distributed, as it would be if there were a lot of stars, the gas would not have this perfect Keplerian rotation,\u201c explained Cambridge PhD student Ignas Juod\u017ebalis, who was co-lead author on one of the studies.<\/p>\n

Keplerian motion is governed by simple laws of gravity so the researchers were able to use the gas velocity measurements to calculate the black hole mass directly – something not previously possible.<\/p>\n

This confirmed the black hole immense – roughly 50 million solar masses – and makes up two-thirds of QSO1\u2019s total mass.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe James Webb Space Telescope. Picture: NASA<\/p>\n

This is thousands of times greater than in nearby galaxies, where supermassive black holes make up only a tiny fraction of the host galaxy\u2019s total mass.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a phenomenal result,\u201d said Cosimo Maiolino, of the University of Florence, co-lead author. \u201cIt is the first direct measurement of a black hole mass within the first billion years after the Big Bang, and it is consistent with the previous measurements.\u201d<\/p>\n

It suggests that assumptions used for indirect mass measurements are valid and that the masses of other black holes in the early universe have not been overestimated.<\/p>\n

And the outsized mass of QSO1 relative to its host galaxy suggests it cannot have formed gradually from much smaller, stellar-mass black holes merging and feeding.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems that we have found a black hole that does not have a substantial host galaxy and that has predated stellar processes,\u201d said Ignas. \u201cThis is very exciting because it is evidence for primordial black holes or direct collapse black holes, which have been theorised but have not been confirmed.\u201d<\/p>\n

QSO1\u2019s black hole may have evolved from a \u2018heavy seed\u2019 that formed within the first second of the big bang or later from the collapse of a giant cloud of gas. But it was almost certainly born big – and may be in the early stages of building a galaxy around it.<\/p>\n

The researchers believe Little Red Dots like QSO1 cannot have been rare in the early universe.<\/p>\n

They are now analysing similar objects to find out whether supermassive black holes do predate the galaxies where they are currently found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the astronomical equivalent of the chicken or the egg debate: which comes first – the galaxy or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1004203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3844],"tags":[276,26748,1491,70,413,32744,83509,16,15],"class_list":["post-1004202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-cambridge","tag-cambridge-university","tag-in-depth","tag-science","tag-space","tag-spotlight","tag-syndicate","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116690214288788174","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1004203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}