this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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James Webb Space Telescope spots a supermassive black hole in the early universe, much sooner after the Big Bang than scientists can explain (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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NASA's Webb telescope spotted an active supermassive black hole that existed 570 million years after the Big Bang. That's really early.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The collapse of star clusters is one hypothesis for the creation of intermediate mass black holes, yes, but those aren't predicated on any actual stars forming. Stars just form as a matter of course.

Stellar mass black holes generally require core-collapse supernovae - which require massive stars - in order to compress the core enough to trigger black hole formation. That isn't true for these larger types of black holes.