An ancient and “nearly naked” black hole that astronomers believe may have been created in the first fraction of a second after the big bang has been spotted by the James Webb space telescope.

If confirmed as a so-called primordial black hole, a theoretical class of object predicted to exist by Stephen Hawking but never before seen, the discovery would upend prevailing theories of the universe.
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“This black hole is nearly naked,” said Prof Roberto Maiolino, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge who is one of the team behind the observations. “This is really challenging for the theories. It seems that this black hole has formed without being preceded by a galaxy around it.”

Primordial black holes are hypothesised to have been formed in the first fraction of a second after the big bang by denser and hotter regions collapsing in on themselves. In this scenario, black holes of varying sizes were stitched into the fabric of the cosmos from almost the beginning and acted as gravitational pockets around which the dust and gas that formed the first galaxies began to cluster. Hawking pioneered the theory in the 1970s, but with no observational proof in the decades since they have come to be viewed as speculative or “exotic”.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/02/primordial-black-hole-big-bang-james-webb-space-telescope

A direct black hole mass measurement in a Little Red Dot at the Epoch of Reionization

Recent discoveries of faint active galactic nuclei (AGN) at the redshift frontier have revealed a plethora of broad Halpha emitters with optically red continua, named Little Red Dots (LRDs), which comprise 15-30% of the high redshift broad line AGN population. Due to their peculiar spectral properties and X-ray weakness, modeling LRDs with standard AGN templates has proven challenging. In particular, the validity of single-epoch virial mass estimates in determining the black hole (BH) masses of LRDs has been called into question, with some models claiming that masses might be overestimated by up to 2 orders of magnitude, and other models claiming that LRDs may be entirely stellar in nature. We report the direct, dynamical BH mass measurement in a strongly lensed LRD at z = 7.04. The combination of lensing with deep spectroscopic data reveals a rotation curve that is inconsistent with a nuclear star cluster, yet can be well explained by Keplerian rotation around a point mass of 50 million Solar masses, consistent with virial BH mass estimates from the Balmer lines. The Keplerian rotation leaves little room for any stellar component in a host galaxy, as we conservatively infer . Such a ''naked'' black hole, together with its near-pristine environment, indicates that this LRD is a massive black hole seed caught in its earliest accretion phase.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21748