Astronomers have clarified the existence of impossible black holes detected by the Webb Space Telescope.

Observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to discover seemingly impossible supermassive black holes. According to models of the evolution of the universe, enormous black holes should not exist within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The authors of a new study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, offer an explanation for how these cosmic giants formed rapidly in the early universe, as reported by Live Science.

Supermassive black holes are located at the centers of nearly all galaxies. They are so massive that their mass can range from 100 thousand times to billions of times that of the Sun. To the astonishment of astronomers, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the existence of such giants at the very beginning of the so-called cosmic dawn, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This means these enormous black holes were already present when the first stars and galaxies began to form.

However, this presents a significant problem, as black holes can only be created from the death of massive stars. Thus, stars must first form, live out their lifespan, die, and only then leave behind a black hole. To become a supermassive black hole, one must merge with another black hole and then continuously consume surrounding matter. According to existing theories, this process takes billions of years. Yet somehow, the supermassive black holes discovered in the early universe emerged in a relatively short time frame by cosmic standards.

The authors of the new study believe that these black holes may have originated as tiny objects in the moments right after the Big Bang and then grew rapidly. This new hypothesis is based on physicist Stephen Hawking's suggestion that an enormous number of tiny primordial black holes could have formed in the first seconds after the Big Bang. They were not created from the death of stars, as none existed, but emerged directly from matter that was compressed by gravity to extremely high densities in the chaos of primordial plasma.

Hawking theorized that these black holes, which could be as small as asteroids, slowly evaporate due to what is known as Hawking radiation, which can still be observed today. After decades of searching, scientists have not found any primordial black holes, and even if they do exist, they would constitute a minuscule fraction of all the matter in the universe.

The study's authors assert that even a small number of primordial black holes could have grown to enormous sizes within 100 million years. This could have occurred because these black holes ended up in the densest concentrations of matter, attracting it to themselves during the earliest stages of cosmic history. Thus, they became supermassive.

Astronomers speculate that perhaps all giant black holes, including the one at the center of the Milky Way, were not formed as a result of stellar death and subsequent mergers. They may have coexisted alongside the first stars and galaxies that were just beginning to form.

Moreover, it is believed that the vast majority of their mass was accumulated by these enormous black holes even before the first starlight illuminated the universe. In other words, scientists believe that when the first stars appeared, massive cosmic black monsters were already present nearby.

So far, this is merely a hypothesis, and researchers wish to incorporate this scenario into models of the evolution of the first stars and galaxies to determine how accurate their assumption is. Following this, scientists aim to compare these models with observational data on supermassive black holes to ascertain whether this explains the mystery of their origin.