The birth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) has puzzled scientists for over two decades. These massive objects, which can weigh millions to billions of times more than our Sun, started to appear less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Traditionally, astronomers believed there wasn’t enough time for them to form through normal processes. But new findings are changing that view.
Recent research using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided evidence for a new theory. Instead of forming from smaller black holes merging, SMBHs may have originated from massive clouds of gas collapsing directly into black holes. This idea supports the existence of “monster stars,” theorized to be 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of our Sun, existing in the early Universe.
The research team, led by Devesh Nandal, included experts from prestigious institutions like the University of Virginia and Monash University. They found compelling evidence in a galaxy called GS 3073, which displayed an unusually high nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio—something that existing star formation models couldn’t explain.
GS 3073 also contains a black hole at its center. This finding suggests that the black hole could be a remnant of one of those massive stars. This ties in with observations of early quasars—extremely bright objects powered by SMBHs—detected by JWST. These quasars existed only a short time after the Big Bang, indicating that massive black holes were forming much earlier than previously thought.
“Chemical abundances act like a cosmic fingerprint,” Nandal said. “The pattern we see in GS 3073 is unlike anything ordinary stars can produce and matches only primordial stars thousands of times more massive than our Sun.”
By modeling how these monster stars function, researchers determined how they produced chemicals like nitrogen. These stars likely fused helium to create carbon, which then reacted with hydrogen to form nitrogen. This process enriched the surrounding gas with nitrogen over millions of years. The team’s calculations found that such stars likely would not explode but would instead collapse into black holes, leaving behind evidence of their existence in the Universe.
These findings shed light on a time known as the “Cosmic Dark Ages,” a period shortly after the Big Bang when the light from galaxies was incredibly faint. Astronomers have struggled to study this era, but JWST’s advanced infrared capabilities are starting to unravel its mysteries.
Whalen, another researcher on the team, likened these ancient stars to dinosaurs on Earth—gigantic and primitive, living for a brief period before disappearing from history. “With GS 3073, we’ve found the first observational evidence of these monster stars,” he said. “Like dinosaurs, they lived incredibly short lives, just a quarter of a million years, which is a blink of an eye in cosmic time.”
As more observations are made, we may discover even more galaxies with similar chemical signatures. This could provide deeper insights into the formation of the early Universe and help solve long-standing mysteries about how supermassive black holes came to be.
For more insights, check out articles from the University of Portsmouth and Nature.
