Observations collected through the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an active supermassive black hole 9 million times the mass of the Sun - one that is actively growing as it slurps up matter from the space around it. This is the earliest growing supermassive black hole detected yet. The black hole was found inside one of the earliest galaxies ever detected, previously known as EGSY8p7 - and since renamed CEERS 1019. Its discovery could help with one of the biggest head-scratchers of the early Universe: how the black holes in the Cosmic Dawn grew to such large sizes in such a short amount of time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   A paper detailing the discovery led by astrophysicist Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin appears in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal.  "We found the most distant, earliest black hole we've ever found," Larson told Science Alert. This Epoch of Reionization, as it is known, is not fully understood. CEERS 1019 and a handfull of other super-early galaxies are excellent targets for this research, because they are relatively bright. The galaxy was identified in Hubble data in 2015, and at that time, was the earliest, most distant galaxy observed. The telescope stared at the galaxy for just one hour, with all four of its instruments, but returned a wealth of data.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 "In the moment I was kind of like, wow look at everything we see with JWST, we've seen this whole portion of the spectrum of this galaxy - and any galaxies early on in the Universe - we've never seen before," Larson told ScienceAlert. "I was just overwhelmed by the amount of information." But then Larson noticed something she wasn't quite expecting. In addition to the light of star formation, there was a broad emission feature usually associated with AGN. When she mentioned it to some AGN researchers, things started to get interesting. As Larson points out, the results came from just one hour of observations. The truly deep observations are expected to reveal more distant, and even fainter galaxies that finally help us understand how the Universe was born and how it grew. The discovery has been published in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     SCIENCE ALERT - SPACE  by MICHELLE STARR