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New Insights on the Formation of Giant Black Holes
Simulation of a black hole. — NASA/File
Recent research has suggested that dark matter may have played a role in the emergence of massive black holes in the early universe.
Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have unveiled an array of exceptionally large black holes that formed in the universe’s infancy, as reported by Space.com. These colossal black holes seem to have emerged just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, some of which are billions of times more massive than our sun.
Typically, black holes form from the collapse of massive stars, a process that leads to black holes with a maximum of several dozen solar masses. Given the limited time that elapsed after the Big Bang, it seems improbable that the universe’s first stars could have formed, died, and thereby created a sufficient number of smaller black holes to eventually grow into the supermassive black holes observed today.
This suggests that there may have been alternative processes at play in the early universe that allowed for the direct formation of massive black holes. One proposed mechanism is the gravitational collapse of enormous clouds of hydrogen and helium gas, eliminating the need for star formation and leading straight to black hole creation.
However, when gas clouds condense, they often generate molecular hydrogen, which is effective at cooling and typically causes the gas to break apart into smaller portions, thus forming a cluster of young stars instead of collapsing directly into black holes. In the early universe, high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light was scarce due to a lack of stars, which could disrupt the formation of molecular hydrogen.
In a new paper released in March, Hao Jiao from McGill University in Quebec and his colleagues have put forth an unconventional hypothesis involving dark matter. Some theories propose that dark matter could be incredibly light, potentially billions of times lighter than neutrinos, the smallest known particles. If this is the case, dark matter may behave more like a quantum ocean on a galactic scale rather than being composed of discrete particles, suggesting a revolutionary perspective on black hole formation in the universe.
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