New Insights Reveal How Supermassive Black Holes Defy Physics

Scientists have discovered that supermassive black holes in the early universe may have grown rapidly by defying the Eddington limit, a rule that typically restricts their growth. Using X-ray data from the XMM-Newton and Chandra telescopes, researchers found evidence of "super-Eddington accretion," where these black holes consumed matter at rates that should have been impossible, allowing them to reach massive sizes less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This finding could help solve the mystery of how such large black holes formed so quickly.