NASA's James Webb Space Telescope broke its own record to discover the oldest black hole yet, but it has astronomers even more confused about the beginning of the universe

• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope discovered the oldest black hole yet.
• The black hole is too big for its time, deepening a growing mystery about the early universe.
• Astronomers may have found a clue in how quickly this black hole is devouring the galaxy around it.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest black hole ever detected, breaking its own record.

The black hole dates back more than 13 billion years, to roughly 430 million years after the Big Bang. That's a blip in cosmic time. The universe was in its infancy when this black hole was devouring its home galaxy.

It's about 40 million years older than the record-breaking black hole Webb also discovered and announced in November.

The new finding is making scientists scratch their heads even harder about what happened in the beginning of the universe, because this black hole is way too big.

A paper detailing the discovery was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Wednesday.

Scientists don't understand how black holes got so big so fast

Black holes form when stars die and collapse into an ultra-dense object with such powerful gravity that not even light can escape its pull. Then the black hole can grow larger as it swallows material from the surrounding galaxy.

The newly discovered black hole is a few million times the mass of our sun.

With scientists' current understanding of this process, it should have taken about a billion years for it to grow to that size. But given its age, this ancient black hole had to achieve a miraculous growth spurt in fewer than 400 million years.

This isn't the first black hole that scientists have found to be too big for its era.

The ancient one discovered in November turned out to be a supermassive black hole with somewhere between 10 million and 100 million times the mass of our sun.

"It is simply too big too early. It's like looking in at a kindergarten classroom and there among all the 5-year-olds is one that is 150 pounds and/or six feet tall," Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago who studies black holes, told The New York Times about that black hole.

But spotting this latest big black hole, earlier than ever in the universe's formation, is "a giant leap forward," Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at University of Cambridge who led Wednesday's paper, said in a press release.

A cosmic clue in this black hole's outsized appetite

This ancient black hole seems to be guzzling the gas in its galaxy much faster than its counterparts that appear later in the universe. In fact, it's eating so quickly that the researchers think it's killing the galaxy by creating an ultra-fast "wind" of gas that could stop new stars from forming.

That galactic gluttony could point to a missing link. Perhaps early black holes just consumed material five times faster than scientists thought possible.

"Very early galaxies were extremely gas-rich, so they would have been like a buffet for black holes," Maiolino said.

Otherwise, early black holes could have been born big. But that would open another can of cosmic worms. It's not clear how the early universe could birth something so massive.

Peering at the early universe with Webb "is like upgrading from Galileo's telescope to a modern telescope overnight," Maiolino said.

He added that his team hopes to search for smaller "seeds" of black holes with future Webb observing time.

Webb may yet discover even older black holes as it peers further and further into the distance, closer and closer to the beginning of everything — and to our understanding of it all.