Gaping black hole with flaming red ring spotted in night sky

From a NOIRLab press release, for which this image was commissioned: 'Astronomers studying a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) with the Gemini South telescope, operated by NSF's NOIRLab, may have detected a never-before-seen way to destroy a star. Unlike most GRBs, which are caused by exploding massive stars or the chance mergers of neutron stars, astronomers have concluded that this GRB came instead from the collision of stars or stellar remnants in the jam-packed environment surrounding a supermassive black hole at the core of an ancient galaxy.' This image depicts the event taking place on the outskirts of the black hole's accretion disc — Black holes are usually found in the centre of galaxies – but which one comes first is your best guess (Picture: Getty Images/Science Photo Libra)

When scientists looked at A2744-QSO1 through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope last year, all they saw was a red smudge.

But in reality, this blob was an ‘extremely red’ supermassive black hole gobbling all sorts of space junk in one of the most shadowy and ancient parts of the universe.

For Earthlings reading this, black holes are cosmic abysses so deep, dark and, well, ravenous that not even light can escape them. They’re often found at the centre of galaxies.

For reasons experts don’t quite understand, the bigger a galaxy is, the more massive its central black hole is.

Yet this supermassive black hole, astronomers wrote in the journal Nature last week, is way too big compared to its comparably tiny host galaxy.

The team examined a group of distant galaxies in the central core of Pandora’s Cluster, also known as Abell 2744, some four billion light-years from Earth.

A2744-QSO1, the ‘red’ supermassive black hole (Picture: James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post) — A2744-QSO1, the ‘red’ supermassive black hole (Picture: **James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post**)

‘We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data. We were scanning the data that arrived for the UNCOVER program, and three very compact yet red-blooming objects prominently stood out and caught our eyes,’ Furtak said in a statement.

‘Their “red-dot” appearance immediately led us to suspect that it was a quasar-like object.’

Quasars are like blowtorches in the centre of galaxies that shoot a baffling amount of energy out into the cosmos. They’re made from the unlucky interstellar matter that gets dragged into the maws of a black hole.

‘Analysis of the object’s colours indicated that it was not a typical star-forming galaxy. This further supported the supermassive blackhole hypothesis,’ said professor Rachel Bezanson, from the University of Pittsburgh and co-lead of the UNCOVER program.