We've spotted strong evidence for a supermassive black hole (of the kind that tend to sit in the center of galaxies like ours, which contains Sagittarius A*) in an extremely distant galaxy - one that formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy.
What makes this important is that we've seen increasing evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist earlier than we've expect if they were born from the deaths of massive stars and slowly accumulating mass in the way "typical" black holes today do.
This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes. Finding support for this alternative model could lead us to new possibilities in physics.
Also important to note that the process of stellar collapse and then black hole accretion takes absolutely enormous amounts of time to collate a large amount of mass together. It's also an extremely energetic process, you would expect to see very bright black holes if millions of solar masses of matter were infalling creating very large and bright accretion disks. We do see some active galactic nuclei but not that many. There's just no way there was enough time for this to happen in the early universe, or really even after a measly 14 billion years (i.e. seeing these young supermassive black holes is challenging for the stellar collapse theory, but the theory was already pretty challenged).
Not to mention if supermassive black holes were being formed by accretion, you would expect to see many intermediate mass black holes (1000-1000000 solar masses) everywhere, but we see almost none.
There's just no way there was enough time for this to happen in the early universe, or really even after a measly 14 billion years
Why do we assume mass distribution in the early universe followed a regular pattern? We can't explain why the universe isn't isotropic and we can't explain why there's more matter than antimatter so why couldn't there have been clumps of very dense matter ready-made to collapse into a black hole?
Because we can see the distribution from the CMB, 380,000 years after the big bang. It's almost perfectly homogenous and isotropic. The images you see of the CMB are amplified a lot, the deviations are on the order of 10^-5 or something.
This in turn puts constraints on the primordial quantum fluctuations that were inflated during the inflation phase, and backtracking through simulations it puts constraints on the entire dark matter and matter history from now back to age 380,000 years.
Just my 2 cents :
The universe was smaller, and maybe a lot of stars created in the same region early after the big bang were unstable, transforming into stellar black holes and just merged to create these super massive black holes (SMBH).
I wonder the number of stellar black holes it takes to merge to create a SMBH.
Either what we know about black hole formation is basically complete (it goes gas -> star -> black hole -> accretion + collisions) but the environment in the early universe was sufficiently different/dense that parameters which rule out the formation of supermassive black holes now were different. Maybe there were many intermediate black holes just in the millions of years after the big bang and things were still close enough together that accretion could happen and collisions were "likely" at the rate needed to form SMBHs after just a billion years. If that is true we might expect to see many many active galactic nuclei as we get better telescopes and look further back, depending on how quickly such black holes formed.
The other option is there is a mechanism of black hole formation that bypasses the above chain which we understand. People talk about supermassive stars, gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes, or primordial black holes that existed due to essentially random distributions of density moments after the big bang causing some regions of space to collapse into massive black holes which then persisted. Such things are far more difficult to observe, but could be inferred if we don't see many many active nuclei as we get better telescopes but all other indications of the accuracy of the big bang + inflationary theory hold true.
I wonder if it's possible that the laws of physics were simply different in the early universe. Perhaps the universe didn't spring into being with the laws being exactly the same as they are now, leading to things happening differently than they do now, causing our models to fail because we're trying to extrapolate backwards with the assumption that the laws of physics are static.
Direct gas collapse would work if there was little angular momentum in the region compared to the overdensity that starts to collapse. I'm sure this has been simulated, how probable is that?
Quasi stars are one of the theories for the existense of the super massive black holes. Here is a nice video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA by Kurzgesagt on this topic.
> This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes.
I'm no expert, but wouldn't it make sense that in a non-uniform expanding explosion, the densely packed areas would behave the way density behaves? If the universe expands over time, isn't it denser near the beginning, allowing large scale density events to take place early in time? Couldn't a dense universe have allowed supermassive stars to form that just immediately collapsed?
It's cool to discover it or anything else, but I'm not clear on why we should be surprised?
No expert either, but what you suggest is hypothesis.
Article reports some new evidence that seem to support it.
Not every seemingly obvious hypothesis is true.
My personal favourite at-first-counterintuitive law of nature: in orbital mechanics, to catch-up, speeding-up does not work. Speeding up (1) changes the orbit, (2) elevates the orbit, (3) higher orbit has lower speed.
(Excluding trivially close distances)
Slow down to get into a lower orbit, where you will overtake your target. Then speed up to get back into the higher orbit where the target will catch up with you.
No, I meant universe. I believe the current models expect that galaxies formed around these SMBHs, not the other way around. After all, if they're collapsing directly from clouds of extremely hot gas, and they have the mass of thousands or millions of stars, it's hard to imagine there were already thousands or millions of stars in the local area not sweeping up or disturbing all that gas.
Black hole formation without star collapse is pretty amazing. I wonder if this is something that could only happening in the early universe, when everything was closer together.
Yes. These primordial SMBHs can have masses comparable to entire galaxies. You most likely won't find that much matter collected densely enough anywhere in the modern universe, or ever again.
If you believe Roger Penrose, at that point spacetime ceases to exist since all matter has thinned out to nothing, all black holes have evaporated. Then, because of math I don't understand, a conformal rescaling happens and you get a new Big Bang.
What breaks my brain is that if the Sun were compressed into a black hole, its Schwarzschild radius would be less than 2 miles, but the biggest black hole we know about so far, Phoenix A, has a Schwarzschild radius of almost 2,000 AU. The radius of Neptune's orbit is "only" about 30 AU, so Phoenix A's Schwarzschild radius is almost 70 times longer. Illustration here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Phoenix_... . And of course, volume increases cubically with radius. I have a hard time contemplating that you could make a black hole that ridiculously ginormous even if you crammed the entire universe into one black hole, and yet Phoenix A is far from the only supermassive black hole out there.
The weird thing about supermassive black holes is that their average density at the Schwarzschild radius actually goes down as they grow bigger. E.g. I just calculated Phoenix A's density is shockingly low at 2*10^-6 g/cm³ which is similar to high altitude in the earth's atmosphere.
In my opinion, it’s the relative (hah) gentleness of the tidal forces at the Schwarzschild radius of supermassive black holes that astounds me. Assuming for a moment that the black hole firewall doesn’t exist, the notion that one can pass through the event horizon, alive, into space that is functionally entirely separate from the rest of the universe is incredible.
> functionally entirely separate from the rest of the universe
It's not really separate, because more things can fall in.
It's also not really separate if black holes may evaporate, in part because it is the outside conditions that determine when (and even if) evaporation begins. There are unsettled questions about whether black holes, even given suitable exterior conditions, fully evaporate; and exactly how to connect what fell into the black hole with what's left after complete evaporation. However, it is the mass inside that gives rise to Hawking radiation outside, so there is some connection.
Otherwise I think you're quite right, particularly about the gentleness of the Weyl curvature (the tidal part of the Riemann curvature tensor) around the event horizon of a large black hole.
"Pass through the event horizon, alive" is the "no-drama conjecture" that is part of the firewalls debate. Indeed, extremely massive black holes should have the least drama in the classical theory which describes black holes in the first place, so what feature of some quantum theory generates extremely high energy particles that we don't find anywhere between the Earth and Moon, or in the Jovian system, etc? "The firewall radiation can only be seen upon crossing an event horizon and there isn't one in those parts of our solar system" is not very satisfying, and it turns out that the arguably best-developed answer to that (by Afshordi/Dykaar/Abedi) is not significantly supported by gravitational wave data (so called repeating damped "echoes" cannot reliably be extracted from the noise) from LIGO, Virgo, and Kagra so far.
> The weird thing about supermassive black holes is that their average density at the Schwarzschild radius actually goes down as they grow bigger.
What does that mean? The Schwarzschild radius is just the distance at which even light can no longer escape, the only matter there is the matter that happens to be falling in at that moment. Unless you mean the average density within the Schwarzschild volume (a term I just made up as far as I know, but you know what I mean) if all the mass of the black hole were spread out evenly throughout it.
> if all the mass of the black hole were spread out evenly throughout it.
That seems like a weird condition. "Average density" is pretty well-defined and doesn't need even spreading.
Even more, isn't the distribution of mass within a black hole a meaningless question? There's no information coming from the black hole, for an external observer it literally doesn't matter how the matter is arranged within.
My comment was on the the innards of the black hole as a meaningless topic. The event horizon (if observable) is likely to have an immense amount of detail on the geometry and mass distribution inside the event horizon.
The interior volume of a black hole doesn't work much like the interior volume of 3-ball <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_(mathematics)>, except perhaps the regions closest to (but inside) the horizon in the limit of the largest black holes. The short version is that a black hole's interior volume grows throughout its lifetime, and the interior of an eternal black hole grows to infinity, even if the area of the event horizon remains unchanged. It's essentially the inverse of a Gabriel's horn <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel%27s_horn>, which develops an infinite surface area (as opposed to the finite event horizon) and a finite volume.
A longer answer is somewhat model-dependent, and somewhat on how one chooses to split spacetime to distinguish spatial distances (for volume) and time (the volume is time-dependent). Unfortunately this means thatg for practicaly any given black hole there is no unique definition of its interior volume.
In general it is fairly safe to say that within generic black holes there is a small volume that tends towards infinite density, and that small volume is embedded in a much larger (even for a tiny-mass black hole) interior space, even fairly early in the (time-dependent) black hole's lifetime (e.g. within a few horizon-diameter light-crossing times after formation by matter collapse).
The most commonly known theoretical models of black holes are, absent perturbation, not time-dependent. This tends to highlight the non-uniqueness of interior volume. DiNunno & Matzner 2008 <https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.1734> is a fine pedagogical treatment. 'An occasional question to the teacher of relativity is: ".. then what is the volume of a black hole?" The answer is that, unlike the response about the surface, the volume depends on the way that the 3-dimensional "constant-time" space containing the black hole is defined.'
I have a memory of a fine and surprisingly accessible treatment by a mathematician about the interior volume of a Schwarzschild BH, but unfortunately I can't find the URL. There are plenty of other discussions about BH interior volumes scattered around the web and the academic literature, although a depressing number of the latter focus on anti-de Sitter (AdS) black holes. Black holes in our universe, like the one in the linked Chandra article or like Phoenix A, are decidedly not embedded in a collapsing spacetime with a lightlike boundary "screen" as would be the case if the exterior spacetime of these black holes were AdS rather than expanding Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker with local overdensities (the galaxies around these black holes). Which is too bad, because if our universe were AdS, the interior volume of a black hole could have a nifty relationship with information complexity; in our universe, shrug.
Two more things for completeness. The exterior of a black hole, if not vacuum, can be relevant in determining the interior volume. Single black hole exact solutions (Schwarzschild, Kerr-Newman) have infinite vacuum outside the horizon, but one can introduce perturbations (lumps of matter or other mass-energy) that raise "bumps" on the horizon and strangenesses in the interior. For a large and relativistic perturbation like a second black hole, or a swarm of them, you run into the problem that in general single black hole solutions do not superpose well (and certainly not linearly). The interiors of "hard" black hole binaries may be very different from that of black hole binaries so soft (or wide, thinking only spatially) that they are barely in mutual orbit. And finally, black holes may evaporate completely, so the spacetime would then be finite, and thus it would be weird to cut the interior spacetime up into time-indexed spatial volumes where some of those volumes are infinite.
Consequently, calculating an average density comparable to that of a homogeneous ball of fluid (or even a differentiated planet like Earth) doesn't really say much about the black hole itself. And that I think is the weird thing related to your comment.
Finally, even for round-planet-sized objects and stars, the interior volumes "suffer" a mainly mass-dependent volume surplus compared to a Euclidean 3-ball. The interior Schwarzschild solution is a starting point; it provides a calculation for the volume of a self-gravitating sphere of a constant-density fluid or gas and this calculation reveals that that volume is greater than the corresponding empty spherical shell <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_Schwarzschild_metric#...>.
...is not what a black hole is. It is not even "something kinda sorta like a sphere with some Schwarzschild radius". It is nothing like any ordinary object you're used to. It doesn't have a well-defined "radius" any more than it has a well-defined volume; the Schwarzschild "radius" is actually sqrt(A / 4 pi), where A is the surface area of the hole's horizon (which in turn is calculated from the mass of the hole).
It’s still useful to talk about the density of matter inside a volume that is equivalent to the volume defined by the sphere with a Schwartzchild radius because it sets an upper limit on the density that a given mass could be before an event horizon would form.
This is relevant to the discussion at hand because for these very large black holes that density is not very high and conceivably a gas cloud of sufficient mass could contract to that density and have an event horizon form without collapsing into Stars.
> It’s still useful to talk about the density of matter inside a volume that is equivalent to the volume defined by the sphere with a Schwartzchild radius because it sets an upper limit on the density that a given mass could be before an event horizon would form.
No, it doesn't. There are indeed upper limits on the mass of objects that are formed from stars that run out of nuclear fuel, before the objects collapse to black holes (the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs and the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit for neutron stars), but those limits are not based on density.
It is true that, especially in the early universe, gas clouds forming very massive black holes without going through the intermediate stage of forming stars is considered possible; but that is not based on the kind of simplistic calculation that you describe. It's based on numerical simulations of the Einstein Field Equation with relevant initial conditions.
Another factor you are not considering is that the universe is expanding, and the early universe was expanding much more rapidly than our current universe is. So gas clouds contracting to form very massive black holes had to work against the expansion to do so. That further complicates the calculations.
> So gas clouds contracting to form very massive black holes had to work against the expansion to do so.
Is that correct? My understanding is that the expansion of the Universe occurs away from large concentrations of mass; expansion doesn't cause the stars in a galaxy to move apart.
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If you consider the observable universe as the upper limit and the plank length as the lower limit, we're much closer to the observable universe (10^-35 meters -> 10^27).
One could argue that Plank length is not the most best lower limit.
Planck the scientist? The Planck length is 10 to the −20 times the diameter of a proton. Why are we using something so small to talk about galactic distances?
We are using it as another point in the comparison between our everyday lives scale, and the extremes of our universe.
It turns out, as beings living in the 10^0m scale, we are much closer to the size of the universe 10^27, than to the smallest possible distance, 10^-35.
Which boggles my mind, I did not imagine the Planck length to be this small, if it even makes sense to use the word "imagine".
Just a note, the Planck lenght is not the smallest possible distance. The plank length is where quantum and graviational effects are of the same "size" and as such, both our theory for gravity and our theory for quantum physics are guaranteed to break down.
It has nothing to do with smallest possible length or something like that and it's just a common mistake in non-scientific physics articles that has sadly spread.
Would it be more correct to say it is the smallest _measurable_ length, just like the "size" of the universe is just the limit of what we can observe (measure) ?
"yes! thus," i suggest, "my comment asking the question that led to this should not be at -4! i feel like my comment got crushed in the collapse of a star!"
The article states that even though it's roughly in the direction of a galaxy cluster that's 3.5 billion light years away, further observations by JWST found it to in fact be some staggering 13.2 billion light years away.
From the article:
> The extremely distant black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, reveal that UHZ1 is much farther away than Abell 2744. At some 13.2 billion light-years away, UHZ1 is seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
Black holes don't "eat" surrounding objects. Their gravity is no different from the gravity of any other object of the same mass. This hole has a mass between 10 and 100 million solar masses; that's about the size of a dwarf galaxy. So its gravity would be no stronger than a similarly sized dwarf galaxy. We are in no danger of having the universe eaten by dwarf galaxies.
If the Sun were replaced by one solar mass black hole, we would freeze/starve to death but the Earth's orbit would be just as stable as it is now.
In fact Earth might survive (as an ice planet) much longer than it would around the Sun since the Sun is expected to become a red giant and possibly swallow the Earth when it dies.
If the Moon were replaced by a black hole of its same mass, we wouldn't even notice except that the night sky would become moonless and we wouldn't have eclipses any more. The tides would keep happening as usual.
Moonlight is actually a very important influence in many natural cycles, all of which would be disrupted.
And as a motivator for both our intellectual curiosity and our scientific curiosity, the lack of a detailed moon in our night sky would have retarded the development of human civilization.
Same, time is like that too. I’m not an sure if this video is entirely accurate but the scale of time and how infantile our current entire universe along with how it’s evolution is depicted can be difficult for me to comprehend
Be sure to switch back when someone asks you to guess their weight or age though. Most people don't appreciate it when you're off by one in logarithmic scale.
> our senses generally work on a log scale, so it’s not something unnatural.
Where confusion creeps back in is when sensory input is quantified. People don't perceive a 1000 lumen source as twice as bright as a 500 lumen source, but tend to think they should.
A question about such distant observations: How can our direct observation of something 13.2 billion light years away not be blocked by intermediate objects? Seemingly adding to the problem is that small closer objects can occlude much larger distant ones; just go outside and shade your eyes, for example, or block your view of an entire galaxy with a small pebble.
Is the universe so empty that it's not a problem? Are we just lucky that this object happens to be directly observable? What proportion of the sky is directly observable at 13.2 billion light years?
>Are we just lucky that this object happens to be directly observable?
Pretty much, yes.
There is plenty we have trouble viewing (e.g. objects that our own galactic plane obstructs), but the universe is Big. Which, luckily for us, means that even though plenty is hidden from our view, there's a lot that we can still observe.
You don't need 100% of the light to reach you to have a clear image of something. Even a small portion of the light is enough to get a clear image.
Also, I would suggest just because we can observe things doesn't mean we can observe them from every direction -- there are directions that are more empty and there are directions where we can't see well. For example, large part of our sky is blocked by our own galaxy arms and center and we can't see well much behind it.
And then there are things that we can observe only because we are extremely lucky (usually through gravitational lensing). When we say "we observed the oldest star" we don't mean there were no other stars at the time this one emitted the light.
But yes, in general, our universe is so empty that most of the light after it became translucent will never hit anything.
> You don't need 100% of the light to reach you to have a clear image of something. Even a small portion of the light is enough to get a clear image.
You can see something that's relatively large (in your field of vision) through a mesh. Something that's a tiny point seems like another matter.
Even if you can't see something directly, you could see emitted light indirectly, that reflects off something else. But that doesn't get you a direct image of it, like the ones the astronomy teams publish.
I think "U" is probably for UNCOVER where that is "Ultradeep Nirspec and nirCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization".
https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~goulding/research_uncover.h... may have some naming-scheme details I missed glancing through the two papers linked there (and the earlier JWST UNCOVER Treasury Survey <https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04026>), or someone might eventually be brave and ask him or one of his collaborators directly. :-)
I think z ~ 10 is technically an ultra-high redshift galaxy. Table 2 in the "Treasury Survey" above predicts observations of tens of galaxies z > 12, when the universe at large is much more likely to be entirely electrically neutral (~ 10 is in the epoch of reionization, more or less). But please come back with "heroic" spectra from z ~ 15-30 (thinking of the linked article at the top with respect to direct-collapse black holes, Pop III, Lyman-Werner radiation, etc etc), or hey GW spectra from z > 10^10 - 10^30 (beyond scope of topic).
I tried looking a bit, and couldn't figure it out either.
I thought the redshift value was typically given in the designation of these ultra-distant objects (e.g. GN-z11, GLASS-z12, GL-z13, JADES-GS-z13-0, at redshifts of ~11, ~12, ~13 respectively) but I guess that must not really be a "rule".
What if the universe is anisotopic? Could the expansion of high density energy during the big bang had some non-uniformity resulting in "chunks" that eventually become matter resulting in possibly more rapid creation of this variety of SMBH? Or maybe such non-uniformity doesn't require anisotropy?
It is. Look up. Look down. The rock below and the sky above aren't homogeneous either (birds, clouds, trees; soil, roots, different size granules of sand and pebbles, clays, etc). But that's locally rather than at cosmologically-large scales.
Cosmic-scale isotropy and homgeneity give us a set of freefalling-in-deep-intergalaxy-cluster-space "Eulerian" observers who see, at the largest scales, a dust of galaxies surrounding them; we can build a set of coordinates that travel with these observers. These comoving coordinates are useful in cosmology, and are arguably "picked out" by the distribution of matter. From them we get the scale factor, a notion of cosmological time that applies throughout the entire universe. In principle any observer could determine a mapping between its preferred local system of coordinates and the comoving coordinates. In practice, we can determine the chemistry of distant objects via (red-shifted) spectral lines.
If the universe were anisotropic at the largest scales, but still homogeneous at the largest scales, we can consider a simple (dipole) case to start with: there is unignorably more matter and cosmic radiation in one half of the sky than in the other half, but each half has spiral galaxies galore. We would need a different system of cosmological coordinates, because observers to the left and right are effectively accelerated with respect to each other (and us, in the middle). The shape of the observable universe would differ; rather than the cosmic horizon(s) we have now that depend on the expansion history, we would have a set of Rindler-like wedges defining the boundaries of cause and effect that depend on both the expansion history and the relative anisotropy. Fascinatingly, the acceleration between the left and right gives an observer a very different evolution of particle numbers in each direction (if I remember late-noughties Einsteinian takes on Rastall's 1972 theory of gravitation, which I am not sure I do, the sparser half will fill with a surprisingly warm thermal bath, so the conservation of energy is broken much much harder in such a universe than in ours, which only has energy "disappear" as light and the like experience redshift with the expansion). We could of course complicate this into a multipole anisotropy, and get things that look even less like what we see. Because of that we "wash out" the local anisotropies (we ignore Andromeda and what we see of the Milky Way as "not cosmologically far enough") and find that the resulting isotropy and homogenity is a very good fit for the cosmic microwave background and ultra-deep-field astronomy. That will continue to be tested with gravitational wave astronomy.
Anisotropic and inhomogeneous cosmologies include those with supervoids and/or strangely-shaped masses (spirals and ellipticals here and there, but in other places or at supergalactic scales weirder structures dominate). One finds such cosmologies used in explorations of structure formation. These cosmologies can look much like ours, in terms of present-day observables. They're certainly more interesting for physicists when they are a very close match to our standard (homogeneous, isotropic) cosmology, but different enough to admit a different coupling between the expansion history and dark matter (the standard one dilutes dark matter in a predictable way at the largest scales, and similarly to the dilution of cold ordinary matter). Daniel Pomarède <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pomar%C3%A8de> is a huge figure in that area of research, and the wiki bio is a good starting point if you have a deeper interest in your first question. Temperature winds up being very important, in part because of an acceleration between observers deep in a supervoid and observers in the non-void web-like or net-like structure, so we have to figure out why the cosmic microwave background doesn't seem to have large cold spots, and why the reticulated structure doesn't glow much warmer. This 2022 Starts With A Bang article by Ethan Siegal is relevant and may be of interest. <https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cmb-cold-spot/>
Finally, your second and third questions are somewhere between "it's not necessary and doesn't really help" and "well if you adapt cosmology to favour a particular channel of early black hole formation you now need a mechanism to restore the small scale temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background".
The video on this page does a very good job of answering the question a lot of you might be asking right now: what happens when you accidentally tread on one of these things:
Blue is free falling into the hole. Yellow is observing and sees Blue’s clock come to a halt on the horizon. Beyond that much I can’t really explain but I found the link on this page:
Highly recommend grabbing a copy of Carlo Rovelli's new book White Holes, he does a great job of explaining black holes and then delves into white holes.
All these reports are so abstract to me since we can't even take a picture of the planets around Alpha/Proxima Centauri 4ly away, nor would we really be able to pick up their radio signals unless we knew EXACTLY what to listen for.
Partly because it was the standard when huge advances were being made in astrophysics in the late 19th/early 20th C. Partly, because some formulae are more convenient to use in cgs than in SI, because cgs is not rationalized and SI is.
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We've spotted strong evidence for a supermassive black hole (of the kind that tend to sit in the center of galaxies like ours, which contains Sagittarius A*) in an extremely distant galaxy - one that formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy.
What makes this important is that we've seen increasing evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist earlier than we've expect if they were born from the deaths of massive stars and slowly accumulating mass in the way "typical" black holes today do.
This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes. Finding support for this alternative model could lead us to new possibilities in physics.