JWST Finds the Closest-Known Pair of Feeding Supermassive Black Holes — and a Shocking Trio in the Early Universe

Host galaxy: The system resides in a gas-rich merging galaxy undergoing a major merger. It was originally identified via X-ray selection from the Chandra COSMOS Legacy Survey before JWST zoomed in .

Key instruments: JWST's NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) confirmed the dual nature by detecting broad emission lines characteristic of actively accreting black holes in both nuclei . The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provided high-resolution imaging of the cold gas and dust fueling the rapid growth of both black holes . Together, the JWST + ALMA dataset allowed the team to measure the black hole separation and the physical conditions of the merger .

Key finding: LID-1166 is the first confirmed close-separation (~kiloparsec-scale) dual AGN discovered beyond the local universe. It offers a direct view of the late-stage merger phase when two supermassive black holes are approaching one another before eventually coalescing . The study was accepted for publication in Nature Astronomy .

System J0148-4214: A Shocking Trio of Black Holes

Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on August 12, 2026, a team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics used JWST to find something even rarer: three actively feeding supermassive black holes in a single galaxy .

Galaxy designation: J0148-4214 .

Cosmic epoch: Seen approximately 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang .

Configuration: Two of the black holes sit remarkably close together near the galaxy's center (just 620 light-years apart), apparently close to merging, while a third black hole lies about 5,500 light-years from the center . The three black holes range from roughly 600,000 to 80 million times the mass of the Sun .

Significance: This is the first evidence of a young galaxy hosting a trio of active supermassive black holes. Two of the three are so close together that they appear nearly indistinguishable without spectroscopic follow-up . The discovery suggests that mergers and interactions in the early universe may have played an important role in the rapid growth of supermassive black holes .

How the Two Discoveries Compare

What These Findings Mean

Both discoveries, announced in the same news cycle (August 12–14, 2026), underscore how JWST is revealing complex multi-black-hole systems that were largely invisible to earlier telescopes. The dual system (LID-1166) answers the question of how close two feeding supermassive black holes can get during a merger in the early universe, while the triple system (J0148-4214) pushes further by showing that galaxies could accumulate three actively accreting black holes simultaneously — a scenario that challenges current models of black hole seeding and galaxy assembly .