Black hole is the most massive discovered in the early Universe

At the core of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole (SMBH). These behemoths are many times the size of ordinary black holes. And unlike your garden-variety stellar-mass black hole, supermassive black holes didn’t form from a collapsing star; rather, they formed.... well, we actually don’t know how they formed. But we do know just how big they are. An ordinary black hole can have about five to several tens of times the mass of the Sun (solar masses), where our own galaxy’s SMBH has about four million solar masses.

While we don’t yet know the mechanism by which SMBHs form, the prevailing thought is that they formed (relatively) small, with “only” 100 to 100,000 solar masses. They would then have gained mass over time as they gobbled up matter, ultimately growing to become the giants we see today.

A new SMBH has now been discovered with about twelve billion solar masses. By itself, that’s not unprecedented; others have been discovered with roughly the same mass. What’s astounding about the new discovery is the extreme distance of the SMBH—about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth—and hence, how quickly after the Big Bang it formed.