A stronomers discovered a supermassive black hole, designated LID-568, that is feeding on matter at an extraordinary rate in the early universe. Observed approximately 1.5 billion years after the ...

A supermassive black hole in the early universe is consuming material at an unprecedented rate, challenging long-standing ...

LID-568 cannot be seen in visible or near-infrared light, but the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) was able to detect faint X-ray emissions.

Earlier this month, a team of US National Science Foundation NOIRLab astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole, called LID-568, that was abnormally bright, which means it was consuming ...

LID-568 may provide an answer as it is the first direct evidence of a black hole experiencing super-Eddington accretion. Suh said that this discovery “suggests that a significant portion of ...

According to the scientists' calculations, the black hole — dubbed LID-568 — is consuming matter at a whopping 40 times what had been believed to be the theoretical limit.

Currently, LID-568 stands at 7.2 million times the mass of the sun, compared to the 4.1-million-solar-mass of Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

In the case of LID-568, this is among the highest known. “This black hole is having a feast,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer and co-author Julia Scharwächter.

One of those objects, LID-568, stood out immediately. LID-568 has high X-ray emission from its central black hole, but Webb is the only instrument capable of gathering this data.

The investigation of LID-568, however, has just begun. Astronomers want to know how this black hole broke its Eddington limit, which means more viewing with the Webb telescope.

Named LID-568 and observed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the object has been dubbed the fastest-feeding black hole in the early universe.

LID-568 has high X-ray emission from its central black hole, but Webb is the only instrument capable of gathering this data. The team used a wider-angle instrument, ...