“Third, as an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole. So, this system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there.

"The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei but in the middle. We asked ourselves: How can we make sense of this?"

Discoveries keep pouring out of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Researchers observed an unusual cluster, which they dubbed the Infinity Galaxy. It appears to support a leading theory on how some supermassive black holes form.

Astronomers using JWST and other telescopes found a supermassive black hole floating between two colliding galaxies — not in either galaxy center, but embedded in shocked gas. Why it matters: If confirmed,

The earliest and most distant supermassive black hole discovered thus far by JWST is CEERS 1019, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass 9 million times that of the sun. That's too big to exist 13.2 billion years or so ago, according to the established models.

But in the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen and astronomers are beginning to understand how they form. Called supermassive black holes, they have been found at the center of pretty much every galaxy and are a hundred thousand to a billion times the mass of our sun.

Black holes are remarkable astronomical objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. The most gigantic ones, known as "supermassive" black holes, can weigh millions to billions times the mass of the Sun. These giants ...