Two massive black holes with a combined mass of two billion times the Sun grew side by side when the universe was only nine hundred million years old, aljazeera.net reported.
Astronomers found the pair using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii. The discovery challenges existing models of how black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Researchers named the scientific pair J1602+4228AB. They also gave the system a Hawaiian name, Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, which refers to two extremely powerful and dark celestial bodies.
The two black holes sit one hundred seventy-one million billion kilometers apart. That separation equals about twenty thousand light-years, or roughly one-fifth the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.
The larger black hole weighs one and one-half billion solar masses, aljazeera.net reported. The second black hole possesses a mass of four hundred million solar masses.
This system represents the closest known pair of quasars from that early cosmic era. Researchers must still definitively rule out any gravitational lens effect creating a false impression of two distinct objects.
Scientists spotted the pair during the Aether program, which investigates two hundred early universe quasars using near-infrared spectroscopy on the James Webb Space Telescope. A faint light source near a known quasar caught the attention of the research team.
The team then used the Gemini North Observatory to separate the signals of both objects and analyze their light spectra. Sylvia Onorato, a lead researcher at NOIRLab, said the skies above Maunakea mountain were clear and stable enough for the team to gather the data in just two nights.
This case marks the third known quasar pair in the epoch of cosmic dawn. It stands apart due to the tight proximity of its components and the immense mass both black holes reached.
Black holes typically require vast amounts of time to accumulate matter and grow larger. The light captured by astronomers left the source when the universe was less than one billion years old.
Onorato said no definitive theoretical explanation exists for how a single giant quasar could exist at that early stage, let alone two neighboring objects of this scale. The research team suggests the pair formed in a densely packed region of the early universe. Interactions between galaxies likely helped feed gas to the black holes and accelerated their growth.
Researchers have not yet fully resolved whether the objects are genuinely separate black holes. Spectral differences point toward a true binary pair, though additional modeling is required for final confirmation.
