Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.

But it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.

Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.