But while GN-z11's record has since been broken, the galaxy remains something of a puzzle. For such an old and compact galaxy, it was oddly luminous. To be that bright, “it would have required a large number of stars packed in such a small volume,” says Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge.
Now, in a paper entitled “A small and vigorous black hole in the early Universe,” published in Nature, Maiolino and his colleagues have an alternative explanation for all that light: a supermassive black hole about 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun. The black hole itself doesn't emit any light but all the material screaming toward it, Maiolino proposes, may well be hot and bright enough to produce the galaxy's intense radiance.
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