Mystery about the Universe’s First Black Holes May Be Solved at Last

  As astronomers read back into the first chapters of the universe’s history, they have uncovered a horde of gigantic black holes that seem to have matured much faster than scientists thought possible.

Priyamvada Natarajan is akin to a cosmic biologist. She studies the life of these precocious black holes, objects so dense that they trap all matter and light within their grasp. As an astronomy graduate student, Natarajan was among the first to treat black holes as populations rather than individual objects by studying their general taxonomy and evolution as though they were bats in a rain forest. Now an astrophysicist at Yale University, Natarajan continues to study the behavior of these animals, and she’s turned her focus to understanding how they’re born.

Traditionally, black holes form in the wake of a large stellar explosion, and they grow in mass as they feast on nearby gas reservoirs. But a handful of observations of supermassive black holes in the very early universe have suggested that there’s more to the picture. In 2006 Natarajan and her colleagues proposed a radical new explanation for how disks of gas could collapse directly into abnormally massive baby black holes without ever forming a star. Last year a joint observation by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory spotted a distant, radiant black hole that appears to verify Natarajan’s prediction at last.

“It’s definitely a very strong case in favor of these heavy black hole seeds,” says Raffaella Schneider, an astrophysicist at Sapienza University of Rome. “[Natarajan] having proposed this idea really helped the community to enlarge our view on the different possibilities that can occur.”

Natarajan spoke to Scientific American about how the recent observations support her proposal for “direct-collapse black holes” and what they tell us about the ancestry of these creatures.