A supermassive black hole with the mass of 20 million suns is barreling through intergalactic space at 2.2 million miles per hour, dragging a trail of newborn stars behind it like a cosmic contrail. And that’s just the headliner from an avalanche of recent James Webb Space Telescope discoveries.
The runaway black hole story began in 2023 when Yale’s Pieter van Dokkum spotted a mysterious bright streak extending from a galaxy in Hubble images. Skeptics suggested it could be an edge-on galaxy. JWST settled the debate by detecting a bow shock at the streak’s tip — a sudden 600 km/s velocity shift across just one kiloparsec, like the sonic boom of a jet but in space. The black hole trails a 200,000 light-year wake of gas and newborn stars, likely ejected via gravitational wave recoil when two merging black holes released an asymmetric burst of gravitational waves.
Science being science, a counter-paper argues the same data could still be an edge-on star-forming galaxy. The debate continues in real time.
JWST also captured MoM-z14, the oldest galaxy ever spectroscopically confirmed, existing just 280 million years after the Big Bang — when the universe was only 2% of its current age. Despite being tiny (240 light-years across, compared to the Milky Way’s 100,000), it contains about 100 million solar masses and was already forming stars prolifically. Its existence challenges models of early galaxy formation.
The telescope also revealed that the early universe was hiding far more supermassive black holes than expected — so-called “little red dots” detected by JWST that turned out to be heavily dust-obscured active galactic nuclei. Some of these black holes appear disproportionately large relative to their host galaxies, contradicting the expected co-evolution pattern.
Finally, JWST detected complex organic molecules, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in galaxies from just 700 million years after the Big Bang. These carbon-rich molecules are building blocks for life as we know it, and finding them this early means the chemical ingredients for life were present far sooner than anyone expected. The universe was not only building galaxies faster than predicted — it was stocking them with life’s ingredients almost from the start.