Finding the Origins of Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers have identified a rapidly growing black hole in the early universe that is considered a crucial "missing link" between young star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope to make this discovery. This artist's impression is of a supermassive black hole that is inside the dust-shrouded core of a vigorously star-forming "starburst" galaxy. It will eventually become an extremely bright quasar once the dust is gone. Discovered in a Hubble deep-sky survey, the dusty black hole dates back to only 750 million years after the Big Bang. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Bartmann