Overview
- JWST observations identify an actively accreting supermassive black hole in CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, seen about 570 million years after the Big Bang.
- The galaxy’s spectrum shows highly ionized, fast-rotating gas, providing direct evidence of a central accreting source.
- The black hole appears overmassive relative to the host’s stellar mass, suggesting black holes may have grown faster than their early galaxies.
- CANUCS results from Webb program #1208 are published in Nature Communications, leveraging the telescope’s NIRSpec sensitivity at high redshift.
- Researchers plan ALMA and additional Webb observations to probe cold gas and dust and to refine black hole and host-galaxy properties, with implications for the origins of later quasars.