Building a supermassive black hole? Skip the star

In the later Universe, supermassive black holes are easy to spot. (credit: NASA/Chandra)

It seems that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core. Based on the presence of extremely bright objects early in the Universe's history, it seems that this relationship goes back to the galaxy's very start—galaxies seem to have been built around these monstrous black holes.

But this presents a bit of a problem. There's a limit to how fast black holes can grow, and they shouldn't have gotten to the supermassive stage anywhere near this quickly. There have been a few models to suggest how they might grow fast enough, but it's hard to get any data on what's going on that early in the Universe's history. Now, however, a team is announcing some of the first observational support for one model: the direct collapse of gas into a black hole without bothering to form a star first.

Most black holes form through the collapse of a star with dozens of times the Sun's mass. The resulting black holes end up being a few times more massive than our local star. But supermassive black holes are a different breed entirely, with masses ranging anywhere from 100,000 times to a billion times that of the Sun.