A dormant, overmassive black hole in the early Universe

Understand

Recent observations have found a large number of supermassive black holes already in place in the first few hundred million years after Big Bang.

• The channels of formation and growth of these early, massive black holes are not clear, with scenarios ranging from heavy seeds to light seeds experiencing bursts of high accretion rate.
• Here we present the detection, from the JADES survey, of broad Halpha emission in a galaxy at z=6.68, which traces a black hole with mass of ~ 4 * 10^8 Msun and accreting at a rate of only 0.02 times the Eddington limit.
• The host galaxy has low star formation rate (~ 1 Msun/yr, a factor of 3 below the star forming main sequence).