James Webb Space Telescope suggests a new origin story for the universe's first supermassive black holes

JWST observations support the idea that some of the universe's earliest supermassive black holes formed by direct collapse of massive gas clouds rather than growing only from smaller stellar remnants.

Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos about how black holes connect fundamental physics to everyday technology. She noted that the same general relativity equations that describe black holes also underlie GPS timing. Astronomers have found that most large galaxies host central supermassive black holes, and telescopes now show such objects existed within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. That early timing challenges models in which black holes grow slowly from stellar remnants and has motivated alternative formation ideas. Key points: - Natarajan and colleagues proposed that under certain primordial conditions, pristine gas clouds could collapse directly into massive black holes without first forming stars, producing "direct-collapse" seeds of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of solar masses. - Starting from such large seeds helps address the timing problem posed by billion-solar-mass black holes observed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. - JWST observations, including the object called UHZ1, indicate accreting supermassive black holes were already present about 470 million years after the Big Bang, with masses on the order of 10 million solar masses. - JWST imaging of the so-called Infinity Galaxy showed two compact galactic nuclei and a supermassive black hole suspended between them in a large gas reservoir, a configuration reported as consistent with direct collapse triggered by a head-on galactic collision. - Natarajan noted that predictions her team made more than a decade ago about distinctive observational signatures have begun to be tested and reported as validated by recent observations. Summary: These observations support the idea that direct-collapse seeds were at least one pathway for forming the universe's earliest supermassive black holes, which eases the timing challenge posed by very massive objects appearing soon after the Big Bang. Undetermined at this time.