The First Black Holes Astronomers are laboring to discover how the universe's first supermassive black holes were born. Birth Stories Matter. When I was a kid, every year on my birthday my mom would regale me with the tale of the day I took my first breath. She'd include all the gory details - and as a nurse practitioner, she could get pretty specific - to ground me in who I am by telling me how I came to be here. Astronomers would like to do the same thing for the universe's supermassive black holes. These gargantuan spacetime potholes lurk at the center of most large galaxies. They can have the mass of millions or even billions of Suns. Like potholes, most of them go unnoticed until they throw something out of whack - say, by shredding a star or projectilevomiting a jet of plasma. Black holes have been around since nearly the beginning of cosmic time. Astronomers see the glow of their superheated gas shining at us from about the same time that galaxies began churning out stars with abandon. But we don't know exactly when they arrived on the scene. Their birthday matters, because how and when they formed determines how much of an impact they had on their host galaxies and the early universe at large - and that impact might have been severe. t IN THE BEGINNING (ALMOST) This artist's concept depicts the quasar ULAS J1120+0641, powered by one of the earliest supermassive black holes detected. Astronomers see this system as it was 750 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 7.1). The black hole contains roughly 2 billion Suns' worth of mass, and scientists have long wondered how the object grew to be so big so early. ESO / M . KO R N M ES S E R s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e .c o m * JANUARY 2017 25http://www.skyandtelescope.com