Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of colliding galaxies, each harbouring a supermassive black hole at its centre. The existence of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang, suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so, they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought, and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets.