{
  "abstract": "The physical processes that led to the formation of billion-solar-mass black holes within the first 700 million years of cosmic time, a period known as cosmic dawn, remain a puzzle 1 . Several theoretical scenarios have been proposed to seed and rapidly grow black holes 2–4 , but direct observations of these mechanisms remain elusive. Here we present a source 660 million years after the Big Bang that exhibits singular properties: among the largest hydrogen Balmer breaks reported at any redshift, broad multi-peaked Hβ emission, and Balmer line absorption in several transitions. We model this source as an enshrouded black hole in which the Balmer break and absorption features are a result of extremely dense, turbulent gas forming a dust-free envelope around a supermassive black hole 5,6 . This source may provide evidence of an early black hole embedded in dense gas—a theoretical configuration proposed to rapidly grow black holes by super-Eddington accretion 7,8 . Radiation from the black hole seems to dominate almost all observed light, leaving limited room for contribution from its host galaxy. If the source merged with its brighter neighbour, it would resemble the recently discovered ‘little red dots’ with perplexing spectral energy distributions 9–11 . The redness of the black hole is due to gas, not dust 12,13 , and scattering, not kinematics, gives rise to the complex line shapes and luminosities—black hole masses of these sources may therefore be overestimated by orders of magnitude.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, HI, USA. rnaidu@hawaii.edu",
    "MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, MA, USA. rnaidu@hawaii.edu",
    "Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), Klosterneuburg, Austria",
    "Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA",
    "Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany",
    "Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), Copenhagen, Denmark",
    "Department of Astronomy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland",
    "Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark",
    "Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA",
    "Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA",
    "Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA",
    "Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia",
    "MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, MA, USA",
    "Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France",
    "Department of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA",
    "Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy",
    "Department of Physics and Astronomy and PITT PACC, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA",
    "Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands",
    "Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK",
    "Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands",
    "Center for Frontier Science, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan",
    "Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er-Sheva, Israel",
    "Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany",
    "Institute of Physics, Lab for galaxy evolution and spectral modelling, EPFL, Observatory of Sauverny, Geneva, Switzerland",
    "Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA",
    "Department of Physics, School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan",
    "Waseda Research Institute for Science and Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan",
    "Center for Astrophysics - Harvard and Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA",
    "Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA",
    "Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA",
    "Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA",
    "GRAPPA, Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy and Institute of High-Energy Physics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands",
    "Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA",
    "Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA",
    "Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA",
    "Department for Astrophysical and Planetary Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA",
    "Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC-INTA, Madrid, Spain",
    "BNP Paribas Corporate & Institutional Banking, Lisbon, Portugal",
    "Departamento de Física, Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal",
    "Departament d'Astronomia i Astrofísica, Universitat de València, València, Spain"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 54,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Rohan P. Naidu",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-3997-5705"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Jorryt Matthee",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2871-127X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        3
      ],
      "name": "Harley Katz",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1561-3814"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        4
      ],
      "name": "Anna de Graaff",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2380-9801"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        6,
        7
      ],
      "name": "Pascal A. Oesch",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5851-6649"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        8
      ],
      "name": "Aaron Smith",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2838-9033"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        9
      ],
      "name": "Jenny E. Greene",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5612-3427"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        7
      ],
      "name": "Gabriel Brammer",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2680-005X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Andrea Weibel",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8928-4465"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        4
      ],
      "name": "Raphael E. Hviding",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4684-9005"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        10
      ],
      "name": "John Chisholm",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-0302-2577"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        11
      ],
      "name": "Ivo Labbé",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2057-5376"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        12
      ],
      "name": "Robert A. Simcoe",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-3769-9559"
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    {
      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Callum Witten",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-1369-6452"
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    {
      "affs": [
        12
      ],
      "name": "Wendy Q. Sun",
      "orcid": "0009-0007-3791-7890"
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    {
      "affs": [
        13
      ],
      "name": "Hakim Atek",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-7570-0824"
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    {
      "affs": [
        14
      ],
      "name": "Josephine F. W. Baggen",
      "orcid": "0009-0005-2295-7246"
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    {
      "affs": [
        15
      ],
      "name": "Sirio Belli",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5615-6018"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        16
      ],
      "name": "Rachel Bezanson",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5063-8254"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        17
      ],
      "name": "Leindert Boogaard",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3952-8588"
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      "affs": [
        18
      ],
      "name": "Sownak Bose",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-0974-5266"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        17
      ],
      "name": "R. J. Bouwens",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4989-2471"
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    {
      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Alba Covelo-Paz",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-9672-3005"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        19
      ],
      "name": "Pratika Dayal",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8460-1564"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        20
      ],
      "name": "Yoshinobu Fudamoto",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-7440-8832"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        21
      ],
      "name": "Lukas J. Furtak",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-6278-032X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Emma Giovinazzo",
      "orcid": "0009-0004-3835-0089"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        9
      ],
      "name": "Andy D. Goulding",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4700-663X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        22
      ],
      "name": "Max B. Gronke",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2491-060X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        6,
        7
      ],
      "name": "K. E. Heintz",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-9389-7413"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        23
      ],
      "name": "Michaela Hirschmann",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3301-3321"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        24
      ],
      "name": "Garth D. Illingworth",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-8096-2837"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        25,
        26
      ],
      "name": "Akio K. Inoue",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-7779-8677"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        27
      ],
      "name": "Benjamin D. Johnson",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-9280-7594"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        28,
        29,
        30
      ],
      "name": "Joel Leja",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-6755-1315"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        31
      ],
      "name": "E. Leonova",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5757-4334"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        32
      ],
      "name": "Ian McConachie",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2446-8770"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        32
      ],
      "name": "Michael V. Maseda",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0695-4414"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        14,
        33,
        34
      ],
      "name": "Priyamvada Natarajan",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5554-8896"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        35
      ],
      "name": "Erica June Nelson",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-7524-374X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        9
      ],
      "name": "David J. Setton",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4075-7393"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        36
      ],
      "name": "Irene Shivaei",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4702-7561"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        37,
        38
      ],
      "name": "David Sobral",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8823-4845"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        39
      ],
      "name": "Mauro Stefanon",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-7768-5309"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sandro Tacchella",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-8224-4505"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        7
      ],
      "name": "Sune Toft",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-3631-7176"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Alberto Torralba",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5586-6950"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        33
      ],
      "name": "Pieter van Dokkum",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-8282-9888"
    },
    {
      "name": "Arjen van der Wel",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5027-0135"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        13
      ],
      "name": "Marta Volonteri",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3216-1322"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        4
      ],
      "name": "Fabian Walter",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4793-7880"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        28,
        29,
        30
      ],
      "name": "Bingjie Wang",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-9269-5046"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        7
      ],
      "name": "Darach J. Watson",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4465-8264"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5
      ],
      "name": "Katherine E. Whitaker",
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  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ex2h1ctsx20pe.bib",
  "cited_by": 272,
  "doi": "10.1038/s41586-026-10846-4",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "ex2h1ctsx20pe",
  "issns": [
    "0028-0836",
    "1476-4687"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10846-4",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "openalex",
      "3103|Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7202266592",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10846-4.pdf",
  "pmcid": "PMC13468124",
  "pmid": "42587117",
  "published": "2026-08-12",
  "publisher": "Nature Portfolio",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ex2h1ctsx20pe.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:18Z",
      "native_id": "W7202266592",
      "source": "openalex",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10846-4"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "astronomy",
      "origin": "openalex:3103|Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena",
      "subfield": "galaxies"
    }
  ],
  "title": "A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn",
  "title_text": "A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-08T13:20:37Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ex2h1ctsx20pe",
  "venue": "Nature",
  "versions": []
}