As galaxies have merged over time to grow larger, their supermassive black holes must merge and grow larger too, scientists theorized.

Supermassive black holes are thought to exist at the center of every galaxy. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently revealed just how little we know about what happened after the Big Bang, when it discovered galaxies 500-700 million years old, in the universe's infancy, that were far more massive than scientists thought possible. No other objects in the universe have such a vast range of sizes like black holes - or such a potential to reveal how the universe first took shape after the Big Bang. 'How do they get to be that big? This has a lot of bearing into understanding how structures in the universe, how galaxies evolved - all the history after the Big Bang, from the beginning to now,' Manuela Campanelli, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology who specializes in black holes and gravitational waves, but is not involved in this experiment, told Insider.

The first direct image ever made of a supermassive black hole.Įvent Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP

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