Quick summary:

We've spotted strong evidence for a supermassive black hole (of the kind that tend to sit in the center of galaxies like ours, which contains Sagittarius A*) in an extremely distant galaxy - one that formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy.

What makes this important is that we've seen increasing evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist earlier than we've expect if they were born from the deaths of massive stars and slowly accumulating mass in the way "typical" black holes today do.

This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes. Finding support for this alternative model could lead us to new possibilities in physics.

> 3.5 billion light-years from Earth

> mass falls between 10 and 100 million suns

The size of the sun already causes my brain to shut down. Everything about this is beyond contemplation.

Related Ars Technica article https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/half-of-the-mass-of-...

A question about such distant observations: How can our direct observation of something 13.2 billion light years away not be blocked by intermediate objects? Seemingly adding to the problem is that small closer objects can occlude much larger distant ones; just go outside and shade your eyes, for example, or block your view of an entire galaxy with a small pebble.

Is the universe so empty that it's not a problem? Are we just lucky that this object happens to be directly observable? What proportion of the sky is directly observable at 13.2 billion light years?

The preprint can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458

Does UHZ1 mean something like "ultra-high Z, #1"? (Z as in redshift)

What if the universe is anisotopic? Could the expansion of high density energy during the big bang had some non-uniformity resulting in "chunks" that eventually become matter resulting in possibly more rapid creation of this variety of SMBH? Or maybe such non-uniformity doesn't require anisotropy?

The video on this page does a very good job of answering the question a lot of you might be asking right now: what happens when you accidentally tread on one of these things:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/72254-s...

Blue is free falling into the hole. Yellow is observing and sees Blue’s clock come to a halt on the horizon. Beyond that much I can’t really explain but I found the link on this page:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/689129/when-an-o...

All these reports are so abstract to me since we can't even take a picture of the planets around Alpha/Proxima Centauri 4ly away, nor would we really be able to pick up their radio signals unless we knew EXACTLY what to listen for.

> This heavily obscured quasar with a bolometric luminosity of ~5 × 10^45 erg s−1

Aka ~5 × 10^38 W. Why do astronomers use ergs?

I wonder how big is (was?) that black hole? Is it the size of our sun?