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Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place
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By NASA
An artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole, a surrounding disk of material falling towards the black hole and a jet containing particles moving away at close to the speed of light. This black hole represents a recently-discovered quasar powered by a black hole. New Chandra observations indicate that the black hole is growing at a rate that exceeds the usual limit for black holes, called the Eddington Limit. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. WeissX-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-Brera/L. Ighina et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A black hole is growing at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, according to a team of astronomers. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may help explain how some black holes can reach enormous masses relatively quickly after the big bang.
The black hole weighs about a billion times the mass of the Sun and is located about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that astronomers are seeing it only 920 million years after the universe began. It is producing more X-rays than any other black hole seen in the first billion years of the universe.
The black hole is powering what scientists call a quasar, an extremely bright object that outshines entire galaxies. The power source of this glowing monster is large amounts of matter funneling around and entering the black hole.
While the same team discovered it two years ago, it took observations from Chandra in 2023 to discover what sets this quasar, RACS J0320-35, apart. The X-ray data reveal that this black hole appears to be growing at a rate that exceeds the normal limit for these objects.
“It was a bit shocking to see this black hole growing by leaps and bounds,” said Luca Ighina of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study.
When matter is pulled toward a black hole it is heated and produces intense radiation over a broad spectrum, including X-rays and optical light. This radiation creates pressure on the infalling material. When the rate of infalling matter reaches a critical value, the radiation pressure balances the black hole’s gravity, and matter cannot normally fall inwards any more rapidly. That maximum is referred to as the Eddington limit.
Scientists think that black holes growing more slowly than the Eddington limit need to be born with masses of about 10,000 Suns or more so they can reach a billion solar masses within a billion years after the big bang — as has been observed in RACS J0320-35. A black hole with such a high birth mass could directly result from an exotic process: the collapse of a huge cloud of dense gas containing unusually low amounts of elements heavier than helium, conditions that may be extremely rare.
If RACS J0320-35 is indeed growing at a high rate — estimated at 2.4 times the Eddington limit — and has done so for a sustained amount of time, its black hole could have started out in a more conventional way, with a mass less than a hundred Suns, caused by the implosion of a massive star.
“By knowing the mass of the black hole and working out how quickly it’s growing, we’re able to work backward to estimate how massive it could have been at birth,” said co-author Alberto Moretti of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Italy. “With this calculation we can now test different ideas on how black holes are born.”
To figure out how fast this black hole is growing (between 300 and 3,000 Suns per year), the researchers compared theoretical models with the X-ray signature, or spectrum, from Chandra, which gives the amounts of X-rays at different energies. They found the Chandra spectrum closely matched what they expected from models of a black hole growing faster than the Eddington limit. Data from optical and infrared light also supports the interpretation that this black hole is packing on weight faster than the Eddington limit allows.
“How did the universe create the first generation of black holes?” said co-author Thomas of Connor, also of the Center for Astrophysics. “This remains one of the biggest questions in astrophysics and this one object is helping us chase down the answer.”
Another scientific mystery addressed by this result concerns the cause of jets of particles that move away from some black holes at close to the speed of light, as seen in RACS J0320-35. Jets like this are rare for quasars, which may mean that the rapid rate of growth of the black hole is somehow contributing to the creation of these jets.
The quasar was previously discovered as part of a radio telescope survey using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, combined with optical data from the Dark Energy Camera, an instrument mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory’s Gemini-South Telescope on Cerro Pachon, Chile was used to obtain the accurate distance of RACS J0320-35.
A paper describing these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available here.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
Visual Description
This release features a quasar located 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, presented as an artist’s illustration and an X-ray image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
In the artist’s illustration, the quasar, RACS J0320-35, sits at our upper left, filling the left side of the image. It resembles a spiraling, motion-blurred disk of orange, red, and yellow streaks. At the center of the disk, surrounded by a glowing, sparking, brilliant yellow light, is a black egg shape. This is a black hole, one of the fastest-growing black holes ever detected. The black hole is also shown in a small Chandra X-ray image inset at our upper right. In that depiction, the black hole appears as a white dot with an outer ring of neon purple.
The artist’s illustration also highlights a jet of particles blasting away from the black hole at the center of the quasar. The streaked silver beam starts at the core of the distant quasar, near our upper left, and shoots down toward our lower right. The blurry beam of energetic particles appears to widen as it draws closer and exits the image.
News Media Contact
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
Corinne Beckinger
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 EditorLee MohonContactCorinne M. Beckingercorinne.m.beckinger@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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What Would It Take to Say We Found Life?
We call this the podium test. What would it take for you personally to confidently stand up in front of an international audience and make that claim? When you put it in that way, I think for a lot of scientists, the bar is really high.
So of course, there would be obvious things, you know, a very clear signature of technology or a skeleton or something like that. But we think that a lot of the evidence that we might encounter first will be much more subtle. For example, chemical signs of life that have to be detected above a background of abiotic chemistry. And really, what we see might depend a lot on where we look.
On Mars, for example, the long history of exploration there gives us a lot of context for what we might find. But we’re potentially talking about samples that are billions of years old in those cases, and on Earth, those kinds of samples, the evidence of life is often degraded and difficult to detect.
On the ocean worlds of our outer solar system, so places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there’s the tantalizing possibility of extant life, meaning life that’s still alive. But potentially we’re talking about exceedingly small amounts of samples that would have to be analyzed with a relatively limited amount of instrumentation that can be carried from Earth billions of miles away.
And then for exoplanets, these are planets beyond our own solar system. Really, what we’re looking for there are very large magnitude signs of life that can be detectable through a telescope from many light-years away. So changes like the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere or changes in surface color.
So any one of those things, if they rose to the suspicion of being evidence of life, would be really heavily scrutinized in a very sort of specific and custom way to that particular observation. But I think there are also some general principles that we can follow. And the first is just: Are we sure we’re seeing what we think we’re seeing? Many of these environments are not very well known to us, and so we need to convince ourselves that we’re actually seeing a clear signal that represents what we think it represents.
Carl Sagan once said, “Life is the hypothesis of last resort,” meaning that we ought to work hard for such a claim to rule out alternative possibilities. So what are those possibilities? One is contamination. The spacecraft and the instruments that we use to look for evidence of life are built in an environment, Earth, that is full of life. And so we need to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not evidence of our own life, but evidence of indigenous life.
If that’s the case, we should ask, should life of the type we’re seeing live there? And finally, we need to ask, is there any other way than life to make that thing, any of the possible abiotic processes that we know and even the ones that we don’t know? And as you can imagine, that will be quite a challenge.
Once we have a piece of evidence in hand that we really do think represents evidence of life, now we can begin to develop hypotheses. For example, do we have separate independent lines of evidence that corroborate what we’ve seen and increase our confidence of life?
Ultimately, all of this has to be looked at hard by the entire scientific community, and in that sense, I think the really operative word in our question is we. What does it take to say we found evidence of life? Because really, the answer, I think, depends on the full scientific community scrutinizing and skepticizing this observation to finally say that we scientists, we as a community and we as humanity found life.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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Written by Michael Allen
An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), has challenged our understanding of what happens to matter in the direct vicinity of a black hole.
With IXPE, astronomers can study incoming X-rays and measure the polarization, a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field.
The polarization degree is a measurement of how aligned those vibrations are to each other. Scientists can use a black hole’s polarization degree to determine the location of the corona – a region of extremely hot, magnetized plasma that surrounds a black hole – and how it generates X-rays.
This illustration of material swirling around a black hole highlights a particular feature, called the “corona,” that shines brightly in X-ray light. In this depiction, the corona can be seen as a purple haze floating above the underlying accretion disk, and extending slightly inside of its inner edge. The material within the inner accretion disk is incredibly hot and would glow with a blinding blue-white light, but here has been reduced in brightness to make the corona stand out with better contrast. Its purple color is purely illustrative, standing in for the X-ray glow that would not be obvious in visible light. The warp in the disk is a realistic representation of how the black hole’s immense gravity acts like an optical lens, distorting our view of the flat disk that encircles it. NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt In April, astronomers used IXPE to measure a 9.1% polarization degree for black hole IGR J17091-3624, much higher than they expected based on theoretical models.
“The black hole IGR J17091-3624 is an extraordinary source which dims and brightens with the likeness of a heartbeat, and NASA’s IXPE allowed us to measure this unique source in a brand-new way.” said Melissa Ewing, the lead of the study based at Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
In X-ray binary systems, an extremely dense object, like a black hole, pulls matter from a nearby source, most often a neighboring star. This matter can begin to swirl around, flattening into a rotating structure known as an accretion disc.
The corona, which lies in the inner region of this accretion disc, can reach extreme temperatures up to 1.8 billion degrees Fahrenheit and radiate very luminous X-rays. These ultra-hot coronas are responsible for some of the brightest X-ray sources in the sky.
Despite how bright the corona is in IGRJ17091-364, at some 28,000 light-years from Earth, it remains far too small and distant for astronomers to capture an image of it.
“Typically, a high polarization degree corresponds with a very edge-on view of the corona. The corona would have to be perfectly shaped and viewed at just the right angle to achieve such a measurement,” said Giorgio Matt, professor at the University of Roma Tre in Italy and a co-author on this paper. “The dimming pattern has yet to be explained by scientists and could hold the keys to understanding this category of black holes.”
The stellar companion of this black hole isn’t bright enough for astronomers to directly estimate the system’s viewing angle, but the unusual changes in brightness observed by IXPE suggest that the edge of the accretion disk was directly facing Earth.
The researchers explored different avenues to explain the high polarization degree.
In one model, astronomers included a “wind” of matter lifted from the accretion disc and launched away from the system, a rarely seen phenomenon. If X-rays from the corona were to meet this matter on their way to IXPE, Compton scattering would occur, leading to these measurements.
Fast Facts
Polarization measurements from IXPE carry information about the orientation and alignment of emitted X-ray light waves. The high the degree of polarization, the more the X-ray waves are traveling in sync. Most polarization in the corona come from a process known as Compton scattering, where light from the accretion disc bounces off the hot plasma of the corona, gaining energy and aligning to vibrate in the same direction. “These winds are one of the most critical missing pieces to understand the growth of all types of black holes,” said Maxime Parra, who led the observation and works on this topic at Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan. “Astronomers could expect future observations to yield even more surprising polarization degree measurements.”
Another model assumed the plasma in the corona could exhibit a very fast outflow. If the plasma were to be streaming outwards at speeds as high as 20% the speed of light, or roughly 124 million miles per hour, relativistic effects could boost the observed polarization.
In both cases, the simulations could recreate the observed polarization without a very specific edge-on view. Researchers will continue to model and test their predictions to better understand the high polarization degree for future research efforts.
More about IXPE
IXPE, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems, Inc., headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.
Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/ixpe
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Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 EditorBeth RidgewayContactCorinne Edmistoncorinne.m.edmiston@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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