Astronomers have directly measured one of the heaviest black holes on record, calculating a mass of about 36 billion times that of the Sun at the centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe, a massive fossil-group galaxy roughly 5 billion light-years from Earth. The international team, led by the University of Portsmouth, combined gravitational-lensing data with the rapid motions of nearby stars to pin down the figure, reporting its results in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 7 August. The object is dormant—currently accreting little material—yet its mass rivals that of a small galaxy, offering fresh evidence that black-hole and galaxy growth are closely linked. In a separate paper published the same day in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope confirmed the earliest known black hole, embedded in the galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9 only 500 million years after the Big Bang. Spectroscopic signatures indicate a central black hole up to 300 million solar masses, helping to explain the unexpected brightness of so-called “little red dot” galaxies detected in early JWST images. The finding suggests that some black holes either formed from unusually massive seeds or grew far more rapidly than standard models predict. Taken together, the two discoveries expand the known range of black-hole masses and ages, from a behemoth that has effectively stopped growing in the recent universe to a youthful giant that emerged when the cosmos was just 3 percent of its current age. Both studies underscore the role of next-generation instruments and analysis techniques in revising theories of how galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve.