 One of the key questions the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to answer was when and how the first black holes formed. Here are multiple images the telescope captured in near-infrared light. Combined they show around 100,000 galaxies. It's known as the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CIRS, for short. In 2023 the CIRS team, using Webb's spectral data, found that the redshift of the black hole named CIRS 1019 was 8.679, making its light travel distance 13.1 billion light years. This supermassive black hole existed just over 570 million years after the Big Bang. That makes it by far one of the oldest black holes ever discovered. It is accreting at 1.2 times the Eddington limit, and has 9 million solar masses. That's double the mass of sag A star, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. To distinguish between the black hole and the galaxy around it, Webb measured the brightness of the light it captures, versus its wavelength. The peak, just past 4.7 microns, represents hydrogen. Webb's data clearly shows two models. The broad model, represented in yellow, fits faster gas swirling in the black holes active accretion disk. The purple model, with a high peak, fits slower gas from new forming stars in the galaxy around the black hole. Here's a Webb infrared image of the galaxy cluster, ABL 2744. There are hundreds of galaxies in the cluster, along with a few foreground stars. Its redshift is 0.308. Light from this cluster took 3.62 billion years to get here. In this cluster, astronomers found a gravitationally lensed distant galaxy, named UHZ-1. A technique called dropout was used to determine how far away this galaxy is. Here's how it works. Hydrogen surrounding galaxies absorbs light with a wavelength around 100 nanometers. That's blue light. The source is easily visible with filtered viewing wavelengths longer than blue. But dropout with blue light filters. This is a standard photometric method for locating distant galaxies in deep field images. For UHZ-1, Webb found the dropout with its F 115W filter. The redshift needed to stretch blue light to this filter gives us the estimated distance. This galaxy's redshift is 10.32, making its light travel distance 13.3 billion light years, just a bit further than Sears 1019. Here's the Chandra X-ray Observatory's overlay view of the area marked in purple. Using over two weeks of observations from Chandra, researchers were able to detect X-ray emissions from the center of UHZ-1. The X-rays come from a region that is much smaller than the galaxy. This is the signature of an accreting supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The X-ray signal is extremely faint. But Chandra was able to detect it because the Able 2744 gravitational lensing enhanced the signal by a factor of four. Based on the brightness and energy of the X-rays, its estimated mass is well above 10 million suns. The extremely large masses of the UHZ-1 supermassive black hole and Sears 1019 at such an early age of the universe has led to a conflict between the currently understood time it takes to form supermassive black holes. And the lambda-cold dark matter Big Bang cosmology timeline. Astronomers call this tension between the two theories, indicating that one or both will need to change. In our final segment of this video book on black holes, we'll cover a proposed change to how black holes can form that would relieve this tension.