A rapidly accelerating black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, as captured in an artwork, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

The black hole pulls in matter at an amazing speed – more than 40 times the theoretical limit.

This data could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.

The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS survey, a catalog drawn from about 4.6 million seconds of observations.

This population of galaxies is very bright in X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous closer shots.

By following James Webb, astronomers could harness the unique sensitivity of infrared light and discern these faint flashes, which help locate the black hole.

The speed and magnitude of these flashes led the team to conclude that a significant fraction of LID-568’s mass accretion may have occurred in a single accretion episode.

LID-568 appears to be accreting matter at a rate 40 times the Eddington limit.

This limit is related to the maximum amount of light that the material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how quickly it can absorb matter so that its internal gravitational force and the external pressure created by its heat of compressed, incoming matter to remain in equilibrium. .