They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.

At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.

They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?

The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.

For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4

The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.

Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.

[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...

The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.

But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?

E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?

Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).

[1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748

Is that not an indirect measurement?

If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000

Coincidence? I don't think so. /s