Folks, we've got a problem.

And that problem is UHZ1.

It's a galaxy discovered in 2023 using a combination of data taken from the James

Webb Space Telescope and the Shandra X-ray Observatory.

Cool. Side story. They use gravitational lensing to see much farther than they normally

would have been able to, but that's not today's tale. Here's the problem. U.HZ1, which I'm just

going to go ahead and call Uzi one, isn't just any galaxy.

It's a quasar.

It's one of the brightest sources of radio emission in the entire universe.

Remember, quasars can outshine millions of galaxies at a time.

And in order to be a quasar, to power a quasar, to generate those kinds

of incredible energies, you need to have a supermassive black hole because it's the material

falling into a supermassive black hole, falling into that immense gravitational well

that compresses and lights up and becomes a quasar. In the Uzi

ones case, we can use the brightness of the quasar to get a rough estimate of the black hole mass,

which turns out to be around 40 million solar masses. That's 40 million times the mass of the

sun. That's big. It's about 10 times

bigger than the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But it's also much,

much smaller than the largest known supermassive black holes which can reach 100 billion solar

masses. So what's the problem? The problem is that this galaxy is

living. This quasar is shining. This black hole is black holeing when the universe was only

3% of its present age. This is just about 470 million years after the Big Bang itself.

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