The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos.

Ablack hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a whole new class of enormous “naked” black holes, upends the textbook understanding of the young universe.

“This is completely off the scale,” said Roberto Maiolino(opens a new tab), an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who helped reveal the nature of the object in a preprint posted on August 29(opens a new tab). “It’s terribly exciting. It’s highly informative.”

“It’s pushing the boundaries on what we think might be true, what we think might happen,” said Dale Kocevski(opens a new tab), an astronomer at Colby College who was not involved in the new research.

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