In the early days of the universe, just 200 million years after the Big Bang, supermassive black holes were found to be growing at incredible rates. These monsters, with masses millions of times that of our Sun, are impossible to explain by standard theories of slow and steady growth from star debris.

However, new evidence from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope suggests an alternative theory for their origin: massive “seeds” are born directly from the collapsing gas. Heavy seeds and direct collapse, according to Priyamvada Natarajan and her team, proposed that giant ancient gas clouds collapsed directly into black holes without going through the star formation stage. A black hole that apparently collapsed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang may have contained thousands of solar masses of material.

The initial massive “seeds” provide a time advantage, which helps explain how billion-solar-mass black holes appeared so quickly. Natarajan’s group predicted that telescopes like Webb would eventually provide evidence of the existence of these heavy seeds. Webb’s Window on Ancient Giants European astronomers have confirmed their scientific theory through their latest JWST observations.

The galaxy UHZ1 contains an actively feeding black hole that exists 470 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass of 10 million solar masses. The Infinity Galaxy system consists of two colliding galaxies, one with a massive black hole that exists within a gas reservoir that supports direct-collapse formation. The discoveries establish the direct-collapse model, which provides an innovative perspective on the formation process of the first cosmic giants during the early universe.