A team of astronomers says it has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed — a cosmic heavyweight that formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 3% of its current age.

The discovery sets a new benchmark for how early supermassive black holes can form and raises questions about their origin and growth.

"When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go," Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the discovery, said in a statement. "We're really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect."

The black hole sits at the center of a galaxy named CAPERS-LRD-z9, which was first flagged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JW

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