{"id":238393,"date":"2026-06-05T02:19:33","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T07:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/jwst-weighs-dormant-black-hole-10-billion-light-years-away"},"modified":"2026-06-05T02:19:33","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T07:19:33","slug":"jwst-weighs-dormant-black-hole-10-billion-light-years-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/jwst-weighs-dormant-black-hole-10-billion-light-years-away","title":{"rendered":"JWST \u2018weighs\u2019 dormant black hole 10 billion light-years away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/jwst-weighs-dormant-black-hole-10-billion-light-years-away.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and \u201cweighed\u201d by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adx5816\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Science<\/i>, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.<\/p>\n<p>The black hole\u2019s mass is about 6 billion times that of the sun, and is being observed at a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, about a quarter of its current age, offering unprecedented details into black holes in the early universe.<\/p>\n<p>To find this, the team used data from NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope to track the motion of stars orbiting around the otherwise invisible black hole to measure its mass. Though the technique\u2014known as <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-07-webb-telescope-distant-supermassive-black.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">stellar dynamics <\/a>\u2014has been used to measure dormant black holes in galaxies much closer to Earth, this is the first time it has been used to weigh one located such a great (cosmological) distance away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and \u201cweighed\u201d by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}