It’s a bonanza! The universe is absolutely teeming with black holes. Researchers have long known this, but less massive black holes that existed in the early universe were too dim to detect – that is until the James Webb Space Telescope began taking observations. Researchers behind the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey are among the first to begin plucking these bright, extremely distant objects from Webb’s highly detailed images and data.

First up: The most distant active supermassive black hole ever found – just over 570 million years after the big bang. It is on the smaller side, more similar to the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy than to the extremely large “monsters” we’ve glimpsed before with other telescopes. CEERS researchers also identified two more small black holes in the early universe, along with almost a dozen extremely distant galaxies. These initial findings suggest that less massive black holes and galaxies might have been more common in the early universe than previously proven.