Astronomers Find Two Giant Black Holes Feeding Side by Side in the Early Universe

Astronomers have found two quasars (actively feeding supermassive black holes) shining side by side just 900 million years after the Big Bang. NSF NOIRLab, which announced the result Nov. 10, 2026, says it is the most distant and most closely separated quasar pair found so far, and the third known pair at cosmic dawn.

Silvia Onorato of NSF NOIRLab, who led the study, says the pair is "a laboratory for astronomers to study how the very first massive galaxies and their central black holes assembled together through direct galaxy interactions during these early times."

According to the team's paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the two objects, designated J1602+4228AB and nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, are separated by about 18,100 light-years, roughly one-fifth the diameter of the Milky Way, and have masses of 1.5 billion and 400 million times that of the Sun. Onorato says there is "no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early in the age of our Universe, much less two."

The pair came out of the Aether survey, a James Webb Space Telescope program compiling a census of the early universe, led by NSF NOIRLab's Emanuele Paolo Farina. The Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, in Hawaii, then resolved the two as separate objects, which NOIRLab says should have been nearly impossible from the ground. Onorato credits the weather: "The sky over Maunakea was so clean and sharp that we managed to collect the data in only two nights."

One possibility remains open. NOIRLab says differences in the two spectra, measured with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph, led the team to favor a real physical pair rather than a gravitational lens making one quasar look like two, but "a lens model is needed to definitively rule out gravitational lensing."

The Hawaiian nickname was created by Larry Kimura, a professor at the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Language College, through the A Hua He Inoa naming program. NOIRLab translates it as "Two celestial bodies of fathomless powerful darkness in the brilliance of heat reincarnating energy into the Universe."