Emily Chan
The observations revealed outflows of gas surrounding the black hole unlike anything ever seen before.
The power, speed, and size of these outflows suggested that much of the black hole’s growth may have occurred during a single black hole feeding episode.
Instead of growing steadily over time, it had a sort of cosmic growth spurt, gaining most of its mass in one big binge.
It has a mass of around 7.2 million solar masses. Perhaps all unexplainably large black holes undergo phases of super-Eddington activity to enable faster growth.
Overall, the discovery shows that black holes are capable of exceeding their Eddington limits and marks another breakthrough in scientific understanding of the early universe.
The research team plans to use JWST to conduct further investigations to learn more about how the supermassive black hole can maintain such a rapid feeding rate without becoming unstable.
Hopefully, their findings will help solve the mystery of how the largest black holes in the universe came to exist.
The details of the study were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
