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Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

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Astronomers Discovered The Earliest Flickering Quasar

Astronomers have made a remarkable discovery that takes us back almost to the beginning of time. They have found the earliest known flickering quasar, a supermassive black hole system that was active just 850 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery is helping scientists understand how some of the universe’s most powerful objects formed so quickly and grew so large in such a short time.

The findings come from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including its MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, along with collaborators from other institutions. The study was published in Nature Astronomy.

💫 What Exactly Is a Quasar?

At the center of almost every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, including in our own Milky Way. Most of the time, these black holes are quiet. But when they become active, they start pulling in nearby gas, dust, and even stars.

This process forms a spinning structure called an accretion disk, where matter moves extremely fast and heats up due to intense gravity and friction. As this material falls inward, it releases enormous energy.

When a supermassive black hole is feeding at a very high rate, it becomes a quasar—one of the brightest objects in the universe.

A quasar can shine so intensely that it outshines the entire galaxy around it. Even from billions of light-years away, astronomers can detect them as bright points of light in deep space.

🌠 A Glimpse Into the Cosmic Dawn

The newly discovered quasar existed during a period known as the cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were just beginning to form.

This quasar’s light has traveled for over 13 billion years before reaching Earth. That means scientists are seeing it as it was when the universe was only about 850 million years old—still very young compared to its current age of 13.8 billion years.

Earlier studies had already found many quasars from this time period, but they appeared only as tiny, steady dots of light. Scientists could confirm their existence but not understand their internal structure.

This discovery is different because researchers were able to observe something never seen before at such an early time: the quasar was flickering.

✨ What Does “Flickering” Mean?

Quasar flickering refers to small changes in brightness over time. This happens because the black hole does not feed on matter at a constant rate.

Instead, gas and dust fall into the black hole in uneven amounts. Sometimes it eats more, sometimes less. These changes create fluctuations in brightness, similar to how a candle flame flickers in the wind.

As explained by researcher Gene Leung from MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research:

“The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole.”

This flickering is extremely useful for scientists because it acts like a cosmic signal, revealing the structure and behavior of matter around the black hole.

🔭 Why This Discovery Is So Important

This is the first time astronomers have detected flickering in such an early quasar. It is not just a visual detail—it provides deep scientific insight.

By studying the flicker, researchers discovered something surprising: the quasar’s accretion disk was flat and thin, similar to much older and more stable black holes seen in the modern universe.

This is unexpected because scientists believed early black holes should look messy and chaotic, not well-structured.

According to Anna-Christina Eilers of MIT:

“What this suggests is that all the messy, very rapid growth phases happen very early on.”

This means supermassive black holes may grow and settle much faster than previously thought.

🕳️ The Mystery of Early Giant Black Holes

One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy is how supermassive black holes grew so large so quickly in the early universe.

Normally, scientists expected that galaxies and black holes would take more than a billion years to fully form and stabilize. But observations show something very different.

More than 200 supermassive black holes have already been discovered in the universe’s first billion years. Some of them are already billions of times more massive than the Sun.

This new discovery adds another layer to the mystery: not only did these black holes exist early, but some of them already had mature, organized structures.

🌌 How Scientists Found the Flicker

Detecting a flickering quasar from such a distant time is extremely difficult. The universe is expanding, which stretches light into longer, redder wavelengths. This effect is called redshift.

It also stretches time itself. So a flicker that happens in a few weeks in real time may appear to take months or even years when observed from Earth.

To solve this challenge, researchers used infrared data from NASA’s NASA mission known as NEOWISE mission.

This space telescope scanned the sky for about 14 years, collecting long-term data that allowed scientists to detect slow brightness changes.

Former MIT researcher Kishalay De, now at Columbia University, helped reprocess this data, which led to the discovery of the flickering signal.

🌟 What the Flicker Revealed

The quasar is incredibly powerful. Scientists estimate it shines with the brightness of about 12 trillion Suns. Its brightness changes by about 20%, which is still equal to the energy of trillions of Suns.

By studying how different wavelengths of light changed over time, scientists were able to map temperature variations in the accretion disk. This helped them understand its structure.

The result was surprising: the disk was thin, flat, and stable, not thick and chaotic as expected for such an early object.

🧠 Why This Changes Our Understanding of Space

This discovery suggests that supermassive black holes may evolve much faster than previously believed. Instead of slowly becoming organized over billions of years, they may go through a rapid and violent growth phase very early in the universe.

As Gene Leung explained:

“The same feeding processes observed in the nearby universe were already in place at very early times.”

This means that even in the early universe, black holes were already behaving in ways similar to modern ones.

🚀 What Comes Next?

Scientists now want to look even deeper into space and time. They hope to find even earlier quasars, possibly ones still in their “baby stages,” before they fully stabilize.

Studying these objects could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology:
How did the first supermassive black holes form so quickly after the Big Bang?

Future telescopes and longer observations will help scientists build a clearer picture of how galaxies and black holes evolved together.

🌌 Conclusion

The discovery of the earliest flickering quasar is more than just another space finding—it is a glimpse into the universe’s childhood.

It shows that even in its earliest days, the universe already contained incredibly powerful and organized structures. These black holes were not only present but actively shaping the galaxies around them.

With every new discovery like this, scientists move one step closer to understanding how the universe transformed from a hot, dense beginning into the vast and structured cosmos we see today.

Reference: Leung, G.C.K., Eilers, AC., Panagiotou, C. et al. Discovery of quasar variability and early accretion disk signatures at cosmic dawn. Nat Astron (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02897-4

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