Close-up: Early Universe View of Galaxy CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 | Webb

Close-up: Early Universe View of Galaxy CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 | Webb

This image shows the location of galaxy CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 in galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 is located in the constellation Leo (the Lion), and is seen by Webb just 570 million years after the Big Bang. It is part of a class of small, very distant and strikingly red galaxies called Little Red Dots (LRDs) that have been spotted in increasing numbers by Webb’s surveys of the early Universe. 

With the help of Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), researchers have confirmed an actively growing supermassive black hole in CANUCS-LRD-z8.6. Analyzing the galaxy’s spectrum yielded an estimate of the black hole’s mass, revealing it to be unusually large for such an early stage in the Universe, and showed that CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 is compact and has not yet produced many heavy elements (a galaxy at an early stage of its evolution). This combination challenges existing theories about the formation of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe.

Science paper "Extreme properties of a compact and massive accreting black hole host in the first 500 Myr":
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65070-x

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Rihtaršič (University of Ljubljana, FMF), R. Tripodi (University of Ljubljana, FMF)

Duration: 30 seconds
Release Date: Nov. 19, 2025

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