By continuing the search for these black hole mergers using the image analysis method developed in this study and statistically measuring the proportion of massive black holes that form close pairs, researchers could determine the role black hole mergers played in black hole growth during their early evolutionary stages.

Researchers agree that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy in today's universe, with a mass ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun. These black holes have masses that are orders of magnitude larger than ordinary black holes, but how they came to be so large is still unknown.

JWST, which has been operational since 2022, has identified several new types of objects in the far universe that are very small and have a characteristic red color. Named Little Red Dots (LRD), researchers think these objects are black holes collecting matter around them and growing rapidly.

A black hole merging with another black hole could explain why the black holes are growing rapidly, but until now, no one had been able to definitively identify two LRDs approaching one another. However, conventional methods may have been the problem. In the case of two LRDs very close together, current methods could have mistakenly treated them as a complex, single object.