Black holes are some of science’s most fascinating and mysterious phenomena—regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. It’s no wonder that black holes are a constant focus of attention for scientists, and 2025 was no exception.
The past year has brought some truly astonishing discoveries. In November, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered a rapidly growing supermassive black hole in the very young Universe. It existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and is located at the center of a small but extremely bright and distant galaxy called CANUCS-LRD-z8.6. The discovery challenges our understanding of how quickly black holes and galaxies could have formed in the early Universe.
In December, the same telescope reported another sensational discovery: the first ever “runaway” supermassive black hole. It has a mass about 10 million times that of the Sun and is hurtling through space at about 3.6 million kilometers per hour (about 1,000 km/s). The black hole pushes a shock wave the size of an entire galaxy in front of it and leaves behind a gas tail about 200,000 light-years long, where new stars are being born.
Scientists say that it would require immense forces to throw such a massive object out of its “home,” but the discoveries of 2025 showed that the Universe still has many surprises for us.
