NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected the most distant active supermassive black hole to date, the agency said on Thursday.

The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed just over 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe.

Webb also identified 11 galaxies that existed when the universe was 470 to 675 million years old, according to NASA.

The black hole within CEERS 1019 is similar to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is 4.6 million times the mass of the sun, said NASA.

This black hole is also not as bright as the more massive behemoths previously detected.

Though smaller, this black hole existed so much earlier that it is still difficult to explain how it formed so soon after the universe began, said NASA.

The Webb telescope enables the scientists to find and verify theories with more precise information compared with other telescopes. The researchers can pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate, according to NASA.

The CEERS 1019 visually appears as three bright clumps rather than a single circular disk. "We're not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances," said CEERS team member Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

"A galaxy merger could be partly responsible for fueling the activity in this galaxy's black hole, and that could also lead to increased star formation."

The Webb's capability is expected to offer a massive amount of data for the scientists to explore about the black holes and the galaxies.

"This set, along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history," said Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Texas.

(With input from Xinhua)