Sophia Nad-Gasr said:

The JWST found the most distant supermassive black hole (SMBH) yet! It's so far that it existed when the Universe was only 570 million years old. This SMBH is a whopping 9 million times the mass of the sun. It was found in the CEERS survey in a galaxy called CEERS 1019. 1/

Sophia Nad-Gasr said:

So there's a lot more to come from this survey. But I said this is a conundrum. Why? Because previously, we've found SMBHs that weigh a few billion times the mass of the sun even the Universe was 1 billion years old. 4/

SMBHs a billion times the mass of the sun so early in the Universe's history poses a great problem for typical black hole growth models to explain: they simply cannot grow that big that fast. Yet we find many of them in the early universe. 5/

It's nice to have observations starting to come in again at a steady rate. We expect based on the way BBT is theoretically constrained that it needs aging or evolution time and/or growth time, which might simply not be available to explain results we get with advances in observational power.

Still doesn't help pick an alternative, mind. But it is interesting that there has not yet emerged something in new data sets that "explains away" some of the already too big/too old phenomena observed before this, like the 900 Myr higher-carbon galaxies.