Astronomers find two giant black holes feeding side by side 900 million years after the Big Bang, earlier than theory explains

Astronomers have found the earliest known close pair of quasars, two giant black holes feeding side by side as they were when the universe was only about 900 million years old, and their size so early is more than current theory can explain, a study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters reports.  Pairs this close turned up about 100 to 1,000 times more often than expected, hinting that black holes grew in crowded, colliding galaxies.  A UC Santa Cruz astronomer at UC Observatories–Lick Observatory is among the 35 authors.

What was found

A quasar is a supermassive black hole swallowing gas so fast that the gas, heated as it spirals in, outshines every star in its galaxy.  The two in this pair weigh about 1.5 billion and 400 million times the sun.  The bigger one's dark edge, the point of no return, would be about as wide as Neptune's orbit around the sun, by our arithmetic.  Both are feeding at or slightly above the theoretical top speed, where the outward push of their light roughly balances the inward pull of gravity.

They sit about 18,100 light-years apart, roughly a fifth of the width of our Milky Way, or about 106 quadrillion miles, by our arithmetic.  Their light left about 12.9 billion years ago; because space has expanded since, the pair is now about 27.6 billion light-years away, by our arithmetic using standard cosmology.  The pair, catalogued J1602+4228AB, received the Hawaiian name Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, roughly two powerful dark bodies in brilliant heat, from Hawaiian-language scholar Larry Kimura's A Hua He Inoa naming program.

How they found it

The team spotted the second quasar in data from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's infrared space observatory, which launched Dec. 25, 2021, and orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth.  Webb's survey, called Aether, has collected 200 quasars from that era, 43% of those known.  The Gemini North telescope, an 8.1-meter (26.6-foot) mirror atop Hawaii's Maunakea volcano at 13,825 feet, in use since 1999, then separated the two in two nights of unusually steady air, NOIRLab's Nov. 10 announcement says.

How sure is it?

The paper calls it a candidate pair.  A galaxy in front could, in principle, bend light to create a fake second image, and the team says differences in the two quasars' light favor a real pair but a lens model is still needed to rule that out.  It is one team's peer-reviewed result and hasn't been independently confirmed.  The quasars are far too faint to see from San Jose, even with a large backyard telescope.

Source:  Onorato et al., "Nāpōwawā‘enakaulua:  A Close Quasar Pair at Cosmic Dawn in the Aether Survey", The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1011:L59 (Nov. 10, 2026, CC BY 4.0); NSF NOIRLab, "Astronomers Discover Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the Oldest Compact Quasar Pair in the Universe" (Nov. 10, 2026, CC BY 4.0); NOIRLab, Gemini North telescope; NASA Science, James Webb Space Telescope mission page.  Size, distance-in-miles and expansion figures are the Daily News's own arithmetic.  Drafted by AI for San Jose.