“It’s the most massive [merger] so far,” says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University, UK, and part of the LVK Collaboration, a wider network of gravitational-wave detectors that encompasses LIGO, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. It’s “about 50% more than the previous record holder”, he says.

But in the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen and astronomers are beginning to understand how they form. Called supermassive black holes, they have been found at the center of pretty much every galaxy and are a hundred thousand to a billion times the mass of our sun.

The earliest and most distant supermassive black hole discovered thus far by JWST is CEERS 1019, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass 9 million times that of the sun. That's too big to exist 13.2 billion years or so ago, according to the established models.

Astronomers have detected the signal of a colossal black hole in deep space that likely formed when two already-large black holes crashed into each other billions of light-years away.

Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars.