A Black Hole as Heavy as Six Billion Suns Is Found

A pencil sketch of a sleeping black hole at the centre of a faraway galaxy. The real one is too far to photograph directly.
A giant black hole as heavy as six billion Suns has been found far away in space. It is more than 10 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists have never measured one this far before.
They used the James Webb Space Telescope to find it. This black hole is “asleep.” The news came out in the journal Science on June 4, 2026.
What Is It?
The black hole sits in the middle of a galaxy. The galaxy is called MRG-M0138. The black hole is six billion times heavier than our Sun.
Why Can’t We See It?
Most big black holes eat gas around them. This makes them shine very bright. But this one has stopped eating. So it gives off no light. To find it, scientists watched how it pulls nearby stars with its gravity.
A Trick of Light
Seeing stars this far away is very hard. So the team used a trick. A big group of galaxies sits in front of MRG-M0138. Its gravity bends the light and makes it look 30 times bigger. This helped the team see tiny details. Dr Andrew Newman led the team. He works at Carnegie Science in California. Scientists from University College London helped too. “We could peer inside the black hole’s sphere of influence,” Newman said.
A Look Into the Past
Light moves fast, but space is huge. So light from this galaxy took billions of years to reach us. We are seeing very old light. That means we see the galaxy as it looked long ago, not as it is today.
Why this matters for us
Big galaxies and black holes grew up side by side. But how did that happen? Nobody fully knows yet. This sleeping black hole gives scientists a rare clue. Each one they find helps fill in the story. Slowly, we learn how our own universe took shape. Scientists think many more sleeping black holes are still hidden. Webb and other telescopes will keep searching for them. Bit by bit, we will learn how galaxies were born.