Three massive black holes have been discovered in a galaxy located in the early universe, 12.5 billion light years away. This has left astronomers surprised that such a complex system could have formed so soon after the big bang.

“This system is in the very, very early universe,” says at the University of Sydney, who wasn’t involved in the discovery. “So, how have we ended up in a situation where these three supermassive black holes have formed and come close together in only a billion years or so since the big bang?”

In December 2024, at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and her colleagues were observing a galaxy known as J0148-4214 through the James Webb Space Telescope when they saw something strange.

At 12.5 billion light years’ distance, the team observed the galaxy as it looked around 1.2 billion years after the big bang, says Übler. “We [also] quickly noticed that the central emission profile of the galaxy had a peculiar shape,” she says.

An analysis revealed two separate regions of high-velocity hydrogen gas in the centre of the galaxy, indicating two so-called accreting black holes that were separated by about 620 light years – a hop, skip and a jump in cosmic terms.

An accreting black hole is a super dense area of space, so compressed that light can’t escape, but that continuously drags in surrounding gas, dust and even stars. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has just one massive black hole at the core of its spiral arms.

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“During examination of the whole galaxy, we also noticed another region in the galaxy outskirts with high-velocity hydrogen gas, indicating another, third growing black hole,” says Übler. This one is more than 5500 light years away from the other two.

“We have explored several alternatives ranging from a single black hole to supernovae, shocks, winds and massive stars, but these were all unsatisfactory or incompatible based on our data and previous observations of this system,” she says.

Until now, there was no evidence that massive black hole triplets existed within the first 1.2 billion years of cosmic history, says Übler. “This discovery shows us that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together,” she says. “It also suggests that black hole merging may have been an additional, fast route for their rapid growth in the early universe.”

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at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that based on the information the researchers have presented, she agrees with their conclusion. “The fingerprints look like black holes and the ‘shape’ is best explained with two separate ones,” she says. “The third black hole is better separated, so it is a much cleaner result. Maybe it is falling into the galaxy for the first time, or maybe it has been ejected by interactions with the other two.”

Having three black holes in close vicinity and in a single system suggests there has recently been a merger of separate galactic entities, says Foster. But she says other interpretations may arise in the future, as more observations of the galaxy are made.

Dobie says that a triple black hole system “seems to be the most promising interpretation of the data that they’re seeing”. He also suspects that as more telescopes come online and technology advances, more such galaxies will be found.

In the centre of our galaxy sits a monster 4.3 million times the mass of the sun. But Sagittarius A* is tiny compared with other black holes in the universe, with some reaching up to 40 billion times the mass of the sun. They are the point where our laws of physics break, and how these giants get so big has puzzled scientists for decades.

Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicst at the University of Oxford and her work looks at how these behemoths affect the galaxy around them. New Scientist‘s digital features editor, Jacklin Kwan, sat down with her to discuss what black holes are, how the supermassive ones get so big and Smethurst’s amazing career.