A black hole in a near-pristine galaxy 700 million years after the Big Bang

Understand

The recent discovery of a large number of massive black holes within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, as well as their peculiar properties, have been largely unexpected based on the extrapolation of the properties of luminous quasars.

• These findings have prompted the development of several theoretical models for the early formation and growth of black holes, which are, however, difficult to differentiate.
• We report the metallicity measurement around a gravitationally lensed massive black hole at redshift 7.04 (classified as a Little Red Dot), hosted in a galaxy with very low dynamical mass.
• The weakness of the [OIII]5007 emission line relative to the narrow H$\beta$ emission indicates extremely low metallicity, about $4\times 10^{-3}$ solar, and even more metal poor in the surrounding few 100 pc.