• A discovered black hole breaks the synchronisation of galaxy growth with black hole growth. Called CID-947, it’s ratio of black hole mass to stellar mass is almost an order of magnitude bigger than what might otherwise be expected. With a mass of 7 billion solar masses, this supermassive black hole compares favourably to some of the most massive known.
  • Using a measurement known as redshift, which tells us how far away – and thereby how old – a galaxy is, the team could see that this supermassive black hole must have grown exceptionally fast. Most models predict black hole masses in the range of millions of solar masses, rather than billions, for a galaxy of this age.
  • This is significant because CID-947 can be interpreted as an early version of the most (extremely) massive galaxies in the present day universe. That is because if we have humongous galaxies in the universe today, then they must have come from something massive in the earlier universe.

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