In a discovery that sounds straight out of science fiction, astronomers have spotted a galaxy shaped like the infinity symbol and nestled in its luminous heart may be the first directly observed newborn supermassive black hole.
This cosmic twist was uncovered by a team led by Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, who dubbed the galaxy “Infinity.” Formed by the recent collision of two galaxies, the strange, figure-eight structure is unlike anything scientists have seen before and it’s hiding something even more extraordinary at its center.
“Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s accreting a lot of material,” said van Dokkum, the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Astronomy and professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the new study. “The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei of the merging galaxies, but in the middle. We asked ourselves: how can we make sense of this?”
The findings, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could upend long-standing theories about how black holes are born and how they grew so massive so quickly in the early universe.
A black hole being born? Scientists think so.
While black holes are typically discovered deep within the centers of galaxies, this one seems to have just formed between the two merging galactic cores. That’s unheard of.
This is as close to a smoking gun as we’re likely ever going to get,” said van Dokkum.
The team made this breakthrough using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), particularly the COSMOS-Web survey. Follow-up observations from Hawaii’s W.M. Keck Observatory, along with archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Array, helped confirm what they were seeing: a powerful black hole surrounded by dense gas, forming in real time.
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A window into the early universe
This discovery could help solve one of astronomy’s most baffling mysteries: How did supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun, form so quickly after the Big Bang?
One popular idea, the “light seeds” theory, suggests that black holes grew from exploding stars over time. But this timeline doesn’t match what Webb has already revealed: massive black holes existed too soon.
That’s where the “heavy seeds” theory comes in, championed by Indian-origin Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan. It suggests that black holes can form when enormous gas clouds collapse directly. The problem? These clouds usually form stars, not black holes.
Infinity might change that.
“In this case, two disk galaxies collided, forming the ring structures of stars that we see,” he said. “During the collision, the gas within these two galaxies shocks and compresses. This compression might just be enough to have formed a dense knot that then collapsed into a black hole.While such collisions are rare events, similarly extreme gas densities are thought to have been quite common at early cosmic epochs, when galaxies began forming,” he added.
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What’s next?
The discovery opens up a new cosmic laboratory, a place where astronomers can study how black holes are born and evolve under extreme conditions. But van Dokkum and his team are clear: more data is needed before anyone writes this into the textbooks.
Still, for now, the “Infinity” galaxy might be more than just a beautiful shape in space- it could be the first glimpse of a black hole coming to life.
And that, in the vast silence of the cosmos, is a story worth listening to.
(This article has been curated by Kaashvi Khubyani, who is an intern with The Indian Express.)
