A Single, 'Naked' Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe (Warning! Naked Black Holes in space)

[usonian]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-universe-20250912/

he 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.



A supersize black hole — seen three times in this JWST image — mysteriously appears in the early universe without a galaxy surrounding it.

A black 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, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who helped reveal the nature of the object in a preprint posted on August 29 . “It’s terribly exciting. It’s highly informative.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21748

Astronomers spied the bare black hole using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — a mega-instrument built by NASA and its partners in part to reveal how galaxies formed during the universe’s first billion years. This new black hole, which is as heavy as 50 million suns and is dubbed QSO1, clashes with the old, provisional account of the galaxy formation process, which did not start with black holes. Black holes were thought to have come along only after a galaxy’s stars gravitationally collapsed into black holes that then merged and grew. But Maiolino and his colleagues described a solitary leviathan with no parent galaxy in sight.

The question now is how this black hole came to exist.

The article explains the "three dots" (gravitational lensing) and now there are over 300 of these known.

There seems to be no rush to label them LRD's (Little Red Dots)
Just QSO's.