{
  "abstract": "Recent discoveries of faint active galactic nuclei (AGN) at the redshift frontier have revealed a plethora of broad Hα emitters with optically red continua, named little red dots (LRDs) 1 , which comprise 15–30% of the high-redshift broad-line AGN population 2 . Owing to their peculiar properties 3–6 , modelling LRDs with standard AGN scenarios has proven challenging. In particular, the validity of single-epoch virial mass estimates in determining the black-hole masses of LRDs has been called into question, with some models claiming that masses might be overestimated by up to two orders of magnitude 7–10 . Here we report a direct, dynamical black-hole mass measurement in a strongly lensed LRD at a redshift of 7.04. The combination of lensing with deep spectroscopic data reveals a rotation curve that is inconsistent with a nuclear star cluster, yet can be well explained by Keplerian rotation around a point mass of 50 million solar masses, consistent with virial black-hole mass estimates. The Keplerian rotation leaves little room for any stellar component in a host galaxy, as we conservatively infer M BH / M ⁎ > 2 (where M BH is the black-hole mass and M ⁎ is the stellar mass). Such a ‘naked’ black hole, together with its near-pristine environment 11 , indicates that this LRD is a massive black-hole seed caught in its earliest accretion phase.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. ij284@cam.ac.uk",
    "Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. ij284@cam.ac.uk",
    "INAF - Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Florence, Italy",
    "Università di Firenze, Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Florence, Italy",
    "Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK",
    "Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK",
    "Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London, UK",
    "Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany",
    "Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC-INTA, Madrid, Spain",
    "Center for Astrophysics ∣ Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA",
    "Department of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA",
    "Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK",
    "Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy",
    "Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, Paris, France",
    "Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada",
    "Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands",
    "Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA",
    "Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK",
    "Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing, China",
    "Waseda Research Institute for Science and Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan",
    "Centre for Astrophysics Research, Department of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK",
    "St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK",
    "Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, CNES, LAM (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille), Marseille, France",
    "Universität Heidelberg, Zentrum für Astronomie, Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, Heidelberg, Germany",
    "Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA",
    "Dipartimento di Fisica, 'Sapienza' Università di Roma, Rome, Italy",
    "Como Lake Center for Astrophysics, DiSAT, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Como, Italy",
    "INAF/Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Monte Porzio Catone, Italy",
    "Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), Copenhagen, Denmark",
    "Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark",
    "Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA",
    "Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics, Texas Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA"
  ],
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  "arxiv": "2508.21748",
  "author_total": 40,
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      "name": "Yuki Isobe",
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      "name": "Sophie Koudmani",
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      "name": "Nicolas Laporte",
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      "name": "Jianwei Lyu",
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      "name": "Jianwei Lyu",
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  "pmcid": "PMC13215880",
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  "published": "2026-05-27",
  "publisher": "Nature Portfolio",
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  "title": "A direct black-hole mass measurement in a little red dot at high redshift",
  "title_text": "A direct black-hole mass measurement in a little red dot at high redshift",
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