Astronomers have discovered a pair of supermassive black holes on the verge of merging, and it could change how we understand the early universe.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has identified three supermassive black holes in the galaxy J0148-4214. The galaxy is more than 12.5 billion light-years from Earth, corresponding to roughly 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, according to an MPE news release.

“This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant universe,” said Hannah Übler, research group leader at MPE and lead author of the study. “It suggests that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together, setting the stage for the massive black hole mergers we expect to detect with future gravitational wave observatories."

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Just a matter of time

Two of the black holes are located in the galactic center and are separated by only 620 light-years, and they're growing, AKA "accreting." They're expected to merge within the next few hundred million years.

A third black hole is located in the outer region of the galaxy, about 5,500 light-years from the center, and may also eventually merge with the others.

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Researchers were also able to determine the size of each black hole. The central pair includes the system's giant (80 million solar masses) and its smallest member (0.6 million solar masses), while the third black hole measures 2 million solar masses. Interestingly, the largest black hole is drawing in surrounding matter much more slowly than its smaller companion. In fact, the smallest black hole is consuming material at an extraordinarily rapid rate that defies standard theoretical limits.

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The findings provide new insights for understanding the growth of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, according to the MPE. They support the idea that mergers and interactions played an important role in the early universe and identify this system as a potential precursor to future black hole mergers that could be observed.