Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed an actively growing supermassive black hole within a galaxy just 570 million years after the Big Bang. Part of a class of small, very distant galaxies that have mystified astronomers, CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 represents a vital piece of this puzzle and challenges existing theories about the formation of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe. The discovery connects early black holes with the luminous quasars we observe today.
To be fair, all scientific models are in some sense wrong. They’re all approximations of reality. They’re all mathematical models that we use to describe and understand our observations and measurements. And like I said, the LCDM model has, over the course of almost a quarter century, proven to be enormously resilient, flexible, and powerful when describing broad swaths of nature.
