The “little red dot” at the beginning of the universe is a naked black hole

The models put the mass of the black hole at about 50 million times that of the Sun, which is consistent with previous estimates. This suggests that the laws governing the light of a black hole have not changed in 13 billion years.

Attempts to estimate the mass of any stars orbiting a black hole showed that it was very small. “Keplerian orbits leave little space for each star region,” the researchers conclude. Attempts to estimate the mass of all the stars in the “galaxy” in which the black hole resides came up with an upper limit of 20 million solar masses – less than half the mass of the black hole itself.

In other words, two-thirds of the mass of QSO1 resides in the black hole, and the stars account for less than one-third. Which explains why the word ‘galaxy’ is in the comment above. “To our knowledge, this upper limit makes QSO1 the largest ‘naked’ ever detected,” the team concludes.

Creating supermassives

Many papers are devoted to the idea of ​​how this black hole grew so early in the history of the Universe. There are three leading theories about this: primordial black holes formed after the Big Bang; direct collapse of large gas clouds that bypass star formation; or destructive conflicts black holes formed in the primary, star clusters.

Here, the researchers argue that having a supermassive black hole with few stars around it suggests that we can ignore the third mechanism. If there are no dense clusters of stars, you cannot create enough black holes to merge. This leaves two options that are speculative at this point.

That said, the discussion seems to indicate that most of the direct fall models currently in operation require a larger source of ultraviolet radiation, and a higher frequency than we see in QSO1. This would seem to favor a black hole as a source, although it would have needed to expand by a factor of 10 over the 700 million years of its existence. This means that there was interbreeding between these people at the beginning of the history of Creation.

All of this makes for an interesting discussion that won’t be resolved until we have more examples of a naked black hole.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10579-4 (About DOIs).