Scientists have detected radio signals from hot gas surrounding a supermassive black hole that existed 12.9 billion years ago, according to new research published in Nature Astronomy from an international team of scientists including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU).

Primordial black holes are the earliest black holes thought to exist, and they vanished almost as fast as they came into being. As Stephen Hawking predicted, black holes don’t only draw particles in, but release particles into space. This Hawking radiation could have scattered into the universe from the earliest black holes.

The James Webb Space Telescope has given us a view of the earliest moments of galaxy formation in the Universe.