The universe’s earliest epochs harbor a cosmic enigma: supermassive black holes that seem to have formed far too quickly. These gargantuan entities, some billions of times the mass of our sun, defy our current understanding of black hole evolution. Astronomers have long believed that black holes arise from the death of massive stars, a process that requires significant time and accretion of matter. However, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected these behemoths existing mere hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang—a timeframe too short to accommodate the traditional stellar death and accretion model.
This perplexing observation has spurred a radical new hypothesis, proposed in a paper submitted to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The researchers suggest that these supermassive black holes may not have formed from collapsing stars at all. Instead, they propose a primordial origin, tracing their existence back to the chaotic first moments of the Big Bang.
The concept echoes Stephen Hawking’s 1970s theory of primordial black holes. Hawking hypothesized that the extreme densities and energy fluctuations of the early universe could have spontaneously created numerous tiny black holes, not born from stellar collapse, but directly from compressed matter and energy. While decades of research haven’t yielded direct evidence of these asteroid-sized black holes, the new paper suggests that even a small fraction of these primordial entities could have grown into the supermassive black holes we observe today.
The researchers’ model proposes a scenario where these minute primordial black holes, formed during the Big Bang, found themselves embedded within the densest regions of early matter. Over the course of roughly 100 million years, they would have voraciously accreted surrounding matter, rapidly increasing their mass. This accelerated growth, coupled with the high density of the early universe, allowed them to reach supermassive proportions within the timeframe observed by JWST.
This theory alters our understanding of the early universe’s composition. Instead of black holes emerging *after* the formation of the first stars and galaxies, they may have existed concurrently, growing in parallel during the cosmic dark ages—the period before starlight illuminated the universe. When the first stars ignited, the cosmos may already have been populated by these massive, pre-existing giants. This hypothesis suggests that even the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy could have had a primordial origin.
The research team emphasizes that this is currently a hypothesis. Further investigation, incorporating this model into simulations of early star and galaxy formation, is crucial to validate its plausibility. By comparing simulated black hole growth under this model with observational data, scientists can assess whether this theory provides a viable explanation for the presence of supermassive black holes in the early universe, resolving a long-standing astronomical mystery. The implications, if confirmed, would fundamentally reshape our understanding of the universe’s evolution from its very beginning.
