Somewhere in the direction of the constellation Boötes, more than 12.9 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are drifting toward each other — separated by only about 18,000 light-years, which is, cosmically speaking, a hair’s breadth. They are the oldest compact quasar pair ever identified, existing just 900 million years after the Big Bang, at a time when the universe was barely in its infancy. And according to standard cosmological theory, neither of them should be anywhere near this large.

Formally designated J1602+4228AB and announced today by NOIRLab, the system has been given a Hawaiian name: Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, meaning roughly “the binary void of the heavens.” The discovery, published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, marks the third confirmed compact quasar pair from the Cosmic Dawn era — and by several measures the most extreme yet found.

Two Black Holes That Broke the Rules

The two objects at the heart of Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua sit at a redshift of z≃6.08, placing their light at an origin point 12.9 billion years ago. Each is an active quasar — a galaxy nucleus where gas is falling into a supermassive black hole so rapidly that it outshines every star in the host galaxy combined. The more massive of the two black holes weighs approximately 1.5 billion solar masses; its companion is around 400 million solar masses. Together, they represent nearly 2 billion solar masses of black hole material existing at a point in cosmic history when the universe was less than a billion years old.

What makes them theoretically difficult to explain is the timing. Standard models of cosmic structure formation predict that black holes grow over billions of years, gradually feeding on gas and merging with other black holes. At z≃6.08, there simply has not been enough time, by the standard account, for gravity and accretion to build objects of this mass. Both black holes are accreting at or above the Eddington limit — the theoretical upper bound on how rapidly matter can fall into a black hole — suggesting they grew faster than any standard model of black hole feeding allows.

Lead author Silvia Onorato, a postdoctoral research associate at NSF NOIRLab, said in the discovery announcement that the finding poses a direct challenge to current formation theory. “There is no definitive theoretical explanation for how these two black holes reached their current masses so early in the universe,” said Onorato, who led the discovery study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This discovery will force theorists to revisit their models.”

The Black Hole Seeding Problem: Physics Under Pressure

The challenge posed by Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua belongs to a larger class of problems that has increasingly troubled Cosmic Dawn astronomy since JWST began its observations of the early universe. The Epoch of Reionization — the period between roughly 150 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies ionized the neutral hydrogen gas that filled the universe — has turned out to be populated with black holes far more massive than the standard model predicted.

The core difficulty is known as the black hole seeding problem. Black holes in the early universe needed a “seed” — an initial object massive enough to grow into a supermassive black hole by z≃6 through accretion and mergers. Standard seeds from collapsing massive stars (stellar-mass black holes of tens of solar masses) would need to accrete at or near the Eddington limit for virtually the entire age of the universe at that point to reach the observed masses. That is a razor-thin margin and implausible under most physical conditions.

One proposed solution involves direct collapse black holes — massive clouds of primordial gas that bypassed the stellar stage and collapsed directly into black holes of 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses, giving them a significant head start in mass growth. Another involves runaway mergers in dense star clusters. Neither model fully accounts for the abundance or mass of the supermassive black holes JWST has found at Cosmic Dawn redshifts. The existence of Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, with two such objects paired together, compounds the theoretical problem rather than resolving it.

How It Was Found: A Three-Telescope Chain

The discovery required three separate telescopes operating across different wavelengths and modes, each performing a step that the others could not.

The search began with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), a wide-field optical-to-near-infrared imager at Subaru Telescope on Maunakea. Using the Lyman-break dropout technique — which identifies high-redshift quasar candidates by their characteristic disappearance from optical filters as the Lyman-alpha emission line is redshifted out of the visible spectrum — the HSC survey flagged J1602+4228AB as a candidate at z≃6.08. At this redshift, the Lyman-alpha emission line is redshifted to approximately 861 nanometers, placing it in the near-infrared and causing the object to effectively vanish from shorter-wavelength filter images.

The James Webb Space Telescope then took over. JWST’s NIRSpec Integral Field Unit — an instrument that captures a spectrum for every spatial position within a small field of view simultaneously — observed the candidate and provided the first spectra of the two individual sources, confirming their redshifts at z≃6.0781 and z≃6.0785. The NIRSpec IFU observations also detected the MgII and Hβ broad emission lines used to estimate the black hole masses via the virial mass estimator. This observation is part of the Aether Survey, a JWST Cycle 3 program led by Emanuele Paolo Farina of NSF NOIRLab, targeting 343 high-redshift quasars between redshifts 5.7 and 7.0.

The angular separation of the two quasars is only about 0.98 arcseconds — close enough that the two objects were initially catalogued as one. The Gemini North telescope, also located on Maunakea on Hawaiʻi Island, provided the confirmatory GNIRS spectra that resolved the two quasars as physically distinct objects at essentially the same redshift, confirming that they form a physically bound system rather than a line-of-sight coincidence.

The Third Discovery of Its Kind: Why the Timing Matters

Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua is the third compact quasar pair confirmed at Cosmic Dawn redshifts, and by some measures the most extreme.

The first confirmed Cosmic Dawn compact quasar pair was announced in June 2024 by Yoshiki Matsuoka and colleagues, also using JWST and ground-based telescopes. That discovery established that pairs of quasars could coexist at z~6, but at smaller masses than those found in the new system.

In July 2026, the European Space Agency’s Euclid quasar survey announced the discovery of additional high-redshift quasar systems, including the most distant single quasar yet confirmed. The Euclid results extended the inventory of known Cosmic Dawn quasars, providing context for the environments in which compact quasar pairs might form.

A third thread arrived in August 2026, when a system designated LID-1166 — detected using JWST and ALMA in combination — was identified as a dual active galactic nucleus at high redshift, confirming that paired or close black hole activity in the early universe is not an isolated phenomenon. Each new discovery narrows the range of theoretical models capable of explaining what JWST is finding at Cosmic Dawn redshifts. For theorists, the accumulation of counterexamples is becoming difficult to dismiss.

A Name From Hawaiʻi

The formal designation J1602+4228AB is a coordinate-based catalogue name that reflects the object’s sky position in the equatorial coordinate system. In recognition of the cultural significance of Maunakea — where both Subaru Telescope and Gemini North are located, on lands held sacred by Native Hawaiian communities — the discovery team worked with the A Hua He Inoa program, a collaboration between NOIRLab and the ʻImiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaiʻi, to assign a Hawaiian name to the newly discovered system.

The name Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua — “the binary void of the heavens” — was chosen in that tradition. The Pōniuāʻena quasar discovery in 2020 established the precedent of assigning Hawaiian names to Maunakea-discovered quasars of significance; Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua is the most recent in that lineage, and among the most scientifically significant objects to receive such a name.

The discovery is detailed in a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The full NOIRLab Science Release noirlab2627 is available on the NOIRLab website.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua?

Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua (formally J1602+4228AB) is the oldest compact quasar pair ever identified, located at a redshift of z≃6.08 — meaning its light originated 12.9 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the Big Bang. It consists of two supermassive black holes totaling nearly 2 billion solar masses, separated by approximately 18,000 light-years. The name is Hawaiian, bestowed through the A Hua He Inoa program run by NOIRLab and the ʻImiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaiʻi.

What is a quasar?

A quasar (quasi-stellar object) is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus — the bright core of a galaxy powered by gas accreting onto a supermassive black hole. As matter falls toward the black hole, it releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of light, often outshining every star in the host galaxy by factors of hundreds or thousands. Quasars at high redshifts are among the most distant and oldest individual objects we can observe with current telescopes.

Why are these black holes so surprising?

Standard cosmological models predict that black holes grow over billions of years through accretion and mergers. At z≃6.08 — only 900 million years after the Big Bang — there has not been enough time, by the standard model’s accounting, for gravity and feeding to build two black holes of approximately 1.5 billion and 400 million solar masses. Both are also accreting at or above the Eddington limit, suggesting they were growing faster than standard accretion physics predicts. Their coexistence at this epoch in a close gravitational pair is not predicted by any current formation model.

What is the black hole seeding problem?

The black hole seeding problem refers to the difficulty in explaining how the seeds of supermassive black holes formed in the early universe. Standard stellar-mass black holes formed from collapsing massive stars — of tens of solar masses — would need to accrete continuously at or near the Eddington limit for virtually the entire age of the universe at z≃6 to reach the masses observed. Proposed alternative seeds, such as direct collapse black holes that skipped the stellar stage and formed at 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses, remain theoretically speculative, and neither they nor any other seed model fully accounts for the abundance and masses of the supermassive black holes JWST has now found at Cosmic Dawn.

What is the JWST Aether survey?

The Aether Survey is a James Webb Space Telescope Cycle 3 observing program (GO#5645) led by Emanuele Paolo Farina of NSF NOIRLab. It targets 343 high-redshift quasars in the redshift range 5.7 to 7.0 — the Epoch of Reionization and Cosmic Dawn — using JWST’s NIRSpec Integral Field Unit to obtain spatially resolved spectra. The survey’s goal is to characterize the host galaxies, black hole masses, accretion rates, and environments of quasars in the early universe. Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua was identified as a compact quasar pair during Aether Survey observations.

What does Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua mean?

Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua is a Hawaiian name meaning roughly “the binary void of the heavens.” It was assigned through the A Hua He Inoa program — a partnership between NSF NOIRLab and the ʻImiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaiʻi — which gives Hawaiian names to significant astronomical objects discovered using telescopes on Maunakea. The program was established in recognition of the cultural and spiritual significance of Maunakea to the Native Hawaiian community. Previous quasars named under this program include Pōniuāʻena, discovered in 2020.