Far back in cosmic time, one small red object is refusing to behave.

Abell 2744–QSO1 appears just 700 million years after the Big Bang, an era when astronomers expect to find young galaxies still putting themselves together. In that picture, stars should come first, building up the visible mass of a galaxy, while black holes grow more gradually inside them. But this object, seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, looks almost upside down.

Its central black hole is estimated at about 50 million times the mass of the sun. The stars around it, by contrast, seem scarce. Some measurements place the stellar mass below about 20 million solar masses. Other estimates push that ceiling much lower, to roughly 1 million solar masses. Either way, the black hole seems uncomfortably large for the meager galaxy around it.

“This is a puzzle, because the traditional theory says that you form stars first, or together with black holes,” Boyuan Liu from the University of Cambridge said.

That mismatch is a big reason Abell 2744–QSO1 has drawn so much attention. It belongs to a strange class of compact, intensely red JWST sources often called “little red dots,” and it is among the most extreme examples yet found. The object also appears chemically primitive, with metallicity in its central region below about 1 percent of the sun’s. In astronomy, low metallicity usually points to limited previous star formation, because heavier elements are forged in stars and spread by supernova explosions.

So the clues pull in opposite directions. A black hole this massive suggests a long growth history. A shortage of stars and metals suggests the opposite.

To explain that contradiction, Liu and collaborators turned to an older and more speculative idea, primordial black holes.

Unlike ordinary black holes, which form when massive stars die, primordial black holes would have formed much earlier, from extreme density fluctuations shortly after the Big Bang. The concept dates back decades, including work by Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr in the 1970s. Most such objects, if they existed, would likely have been small. The question here was whether a rare, much heavier one could have shaped its surroundings early enough to produce something like Abell 2744–QSO1.

“With these new observations that normal (black hole formation) theories struggle to reproduce, the possibility of having massive primordial black holes in the early universe becomes more permissible,” Liu added.

That is not the same as claiming the mystery is solved. The research argues that a primordial black hole pathway is plausible, not proven.

To test the idea, the team used the GIZMO simulation code to follow the growth of an isolated black hole and its environment from very early cosmic times down to redshift 7, the epoch where JWST sees Abell 2744–QSO1. The model tracked dark matter, gas, star formation, chemical enrichment, and energy feedback from both the black hole and exploding stars.

The setup began with a black hole already weighing 50 million solar masses at the center of a small simulated region. From there, the team followed how gas fell inward, cooled, formed stars, or failed to do so.

The simulations produced a striking pattern. A huge black hole can help pull matter together and speed up halo growth, but the same object can also heat the incoming gas so strongly that star formation stalls.

In the team’s main runs, the black hole accreted at about 1 to 10 percent of the Eddington rate, the theoretical ceiling for steady growth. That matches the low accretion efficiency inferred for Abell 2744–QSO1, around 0.01 to 0.03. By redshift 7, the modeled black hole had grown to about 60 million solar masses, close to the observed estimate.

Stars were another story.

Even with gas nearby, black hole feedback kept conditions hostile enough that star formation did not begin until below about redshift 10. When it finally started, it happened in bursts rather than as a steady process.

In one run, where star formation was allowed but stellar feedback was not fully modeled, the system produced about 20 million solar masses of stars by redshift 7. That lands near the upper end of what some observations still allow.

But in the run that included full stellar feedback, the outcome changed sharply. There was only one star-forming episode, lasting about 50 million years, and then the system shut down. By redshift 7, the total stellar mass near the black hole was just about 770,000 solar masses, split between Population III and Population II stars. That fits the stricter observational constraints that place the stellar mass below roughly 1 million solar masses.

The stars that did form gathered into a compact cluster with a half-mass radius of about 55 parsecs. Outside that small core, gas dominated the inner region, while a steep spike of dark matter built up near the center.

Chemistry turned out to matter as much as gravity.

“We found that the chemistry story mattered because Abell 2744–QSO1 appears metal-poor. In the full feedback run, Population III stars formed first in dense gas. Their short lifetimes, around 3 million years, led to rapid local enrichment. That enrichment pushed metallicity above the threshold that allowed Population II stars to form,” Lui explained to The Brighter Side of News.

“At the same time, black hole growth intensified. Dense gas clouds near the center boosted accretion by about a factor of 10. Then the black hole’s thermal feedback drove strong outflows,” he continued.

Those outflows became central to the story. Supernovae and stars created metals, but black hole feedback then pushed much of that enriched gas outward. At the same time, pristine gas from the intergalactic medium kept flowing inward. The result was a cycle of enrichment, expulsion, and dilution that lowered the average metallicity around the black hole.

In the full-feedback run, the central region briefly reached higher metallicities, then dropped back down to levels consistent with what JWST sees, depending on exactly when the object is observed. That gives astronomers two possible snapshots for Abell 2744–QSO1: either just before its first real starburst, or shortly after that burst has already been quenched.

The scenario is coherent, but it is still a proof of concept.

The model uses a single primordial black hole in an isolated box, not a full population with a range of masses. It does not include primordial black hole clustering, mergers with forming galaxies, or a wider set of feedback effects such as jets or radiation pressure. The dark matter treatment is simplified, and the supernova model may smooth out the messy, uneven mixing of metals that likely happens in real systems.

There is also a deeper issue. Primordial black holes this massive are not easy to produce in many standard versions of the idea. One possible workaround is that smaller primordial black holes might have formed in dense clusters and merged into larger ones, but that remains uncertain.

Still, the match is hard to ignore. The simulations reproduce several of the observed traits of Abell 2744–QSO1 at once: a very large black hole, very little stellar mass, low metallicity, and a sub-Eddington accretion rate. That does not make the primordial black hole explanation correct. It does make it harder to dismiss.

This work sharpens a growing question raised by JWST: did some of the early universe’s black holes form through channels that do not fit the usual star-first story?

If more objects like Abell 2744–QSO1 turn up, astronomers may need to widen the list of viable formation pathways for the first supermassive black holes. The findings also suggest that black hole feedback could dominate much earlier in cosmic history than many models assumed, suppressing star formation before galaxies fully develop.

Future JWST ultra-deep surveys could help sort that out by finding more little red dots and measuring how common black hole-heavy, metal-poor systems really are. Better observations of their metallicity, stellar content, and environments could also help distinguish primordial black hole seeds from other ideas now competing to explain these strange early objects.

Research findings are available online in the journal arXiv.