The first direct mass measurement from the early universe weighs in on the debate over the origins of supermassive black holes.
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? For decades, the standard response has been that we don’t really know, but it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and then collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge with one another over time to form more massive entities.
The problem is that it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.
Now, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear observational evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without going through a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.
“This is a remarkable finding,” said Professor Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, co-author of two studies published in Nature and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “It’s a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow.”
