Sophia Gad-Nasr
Nearly every massive galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole (like Interstellar's Gargantua), but how do they form so early? One neat method is direct collapse, where gas skips the star phase and collapses right into a black hole. This only happens in the early universe when gas is pristine and a particular UV radiation permeates. The UV along with gas having no heavy elements prevents cooling and breaking apart, allowing gas clouds to collapse right into black holes the mass of ~100,000 suns.
Jul 3 at 8:25amWeb
Show threadSophia Gad-Nasr6d ago
A black hole of that mass would be a great seed for supermassive black holes. At this mass, the black hole has enough time to grow from merging with other black holes and eating up gas, so that SMBHs 1 billion solar masses existing when the universe was less than 700 million years old is just fine! It's a really cool possibility for how SMBHs form, and the JWST has seen evidence that COULD be explained by these seeds. But, there's another REALLY NEAT possibility. I'll share this next!