The JWST Finds More Overmassive Black Holes. This Time In Dwarf Galaxies
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The JWST has shown us that supermassive black holes were much larger in the early Universe than we thought. New research has extended this understanding to more intermediate redshifts, and to dwarf galaxies. Could the often-invoked Super-Eddington accretion be responsible?
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The JWST Finds More Overmassive Black Holes. This Time In Dwarf Galaxies By Evan Gough - March 25, 2026 04:40 PM UTC | Black Holes One of the things astronomers find when they look around at galaxies is a correlation between a galaxy's mass and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Contrary to popular belief, these SMBH don't anchor their galaxies; they make up only a small portion of a galaxy's mass. In local galaxies, the ratio of SMBH mass to galaxy mass is about 0.1–0.5%. But the JWST has upended that notion. Its deep infrared observations have shown that galaxies in the early Universe can have much larger SMBH than that, leading to questions about our understanding of galaxy growth. Simply put, these galaxies shouldn't have such huge black holes so early in the Universe's life, according to our understanding. Now some new research based largely on the JWST has identified a pair of dwarf galaxies that appear to have rule-breaking SMBH. They're not the first dwarf galaxies with such massive black holes, but they're different than many others. They're not as ancient and are at intermediate redshifts. The research is titled " JWST Reveals Two Overmassive Black Hole Candidates in Dwarf Galaxies at z≈0.7: Pushing Black Hole Searches into the Dwarf-Galaxy Regime ." The lead author is Eduardo Iani, a PhD Fellow at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. The research has been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics and is available in pre-print form at arxiv.org. "We report the discovery and characterization of two compact galaxies, Pelias and Neleus, at z ~ 0.71 and z ~ 0.75," the researchers write. "Both exhibit unusual spectral energy distributions , with very blue rest-frame UV-optical emission and a steep rise toward near- and mid-infrared wavelengths." There's a discrepancy in the observations of this pair of galaxies. In the UV-optical that the JWST's NIRISS/NIRSpec can observe, the galaxies look like pristine, low-mass starburst galaxies....
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