At the heart of almost every large galaxy lies an object of immense proportions — a supermassive black hole. Up to billions of times more massive than our sun, these titans
drive the evolution of the galaxies they inhabit.
Yet astronomers can’t figure out how they got so big. Some appear to have formed as early as
600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 4% of its current age. From our understanding of black hole growth, that seems impossible. “There is simply not enough time to build such a massive black hole so early in the universe,” said
Łukasz Wyrzykowski, an astronomer at Warsaw University. Without, that is, something to seed their growth, he said.
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