Researchers have uncovered the most ancient black hole to date, a colossal celestial entity that took shape a mere 470 million years following the occurrence of the Big Bang.

The outcomes of this revelation, published on Monday, affirm long-standing theories that supermassive black holes were in existence at the inception of the universe.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory collaborated over the past year to facilitate these groundbreaking observations.

Considering the universe’s age of 13.7 billion years, this black hole’s origin can be traced back 13.2 billion years, rendering it an extraordinary find, ABC News reported.

Even more astonishing to scientists is the sheer size of this black hole—it surpasses the mass of the black hole within our own Milky Way by a factor of 10.

Lead author Akos Bogdan, affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, postulates that it potentially weighs between 10% and 100% of the combined mass of all the stars within its galaxy.

This magnitude stands in stark contrast to the considerably smaller proportions of black holes found within our Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, which are estimated to represent a mere 0.1% of their respective galactic stellar masses, as he pointed out.

Written by B.C. Begley