Astronomers have spent years trying to figure out how galaxies form and grow, but the James Webb Space Telescope just threw them a curveball. It found a galaxy called Virgil—though most people now call it “Jekyll and Hyde”. Why? Because this galaxy has two faces – at first glance, Virgil looks pretty normal. It’s quietly making new stars, nothing flashy. But dig a little deeper—thanks to JWST’s sharp eyes—and you find something wild hiding in all that dust: a supermassive black hole blasting out energy, totally hidden from older telescopes.
Astronomers call it ‘overmassive’
This black hole is way too big for its galaxy. It’s what astronomers call “overmassive”. Usually, galaxies and their central black holes grow up together, more or less in sync. Virgil doesn’t play by those rules. So now scientists are left scratching their heads, wondering how this black hole got so huge so early on—especially since we’re talking about a time not long after the Big Bang.
The real breakthrough came from JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. That thing can see right through thick cosmic dust. With ultraviolet and optical telescopes, Virgil just looked calm and unremarkable. But MIRI caught a massive surge of energy coming from the centre – clear proof of the black hole’s true strength.
“UV and optical show us the galaxy’s calm face, but MIRI shows the monster inside,” said George Rieke, one of the lead scientists. Now, astronomers are starting to think there might be a lot more of these hidden black holes sitting quietly inside galaxies we used to think were ordinary.
Virgil also fits into a group called the Little Red Dots. JWST spotted these tiny, dust-shrouded galaxies from about 600 million years after the Big Bang. They’re tough to study—old telescopes just couldn’t see through all the dust. Oddly enough, these Little Red Dots seem to vanish after about two billion years, and researchers hope that by studying Virgil, they can finally figure out what happened to them.
Cosmos still has plenty of secrets
Pierluigi Rinaldi from the Space Telescope Science Institute says JWST’s infrared vision is letting scientists see the universe in ways they never could before. The discovery of Virgil is a big reminder: the cosmos still has plenty of secrets, and there are probably more “cosmic monsters” out there, just waiting to be found.
Virgil is not just another Galaxy, but it’s changing the way we think about how galaxies and black holes grew up together in the early universe. And it’s proof that JWST is already rewriting the story of astronomy.