Supermassive Black Holes May Have Formed Without Any Stars.
Stellar-mass black holes, which are formed by stars going supernova, weigh between a few and a few dozen times the mass of the Sun. At the center of galaxies, however, there are supermassive black holes weighing millions, if not billions, of times the mass of our Sun. For a long time, astronomers believed that these supermassive black hole grew slowly but in recent years, observations have shown that these giants were already in place and massive long before the first stars formed.
Researchers trying to wrap their heads around these objects' formations have considered quite a few scenarios. Now a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters combines some of those ideas, suggesting that these primordial black holes may have collapsed from a very large cloud of gas that, given the gravity and short time-scale, had no time to break apart and turn into stars. These are called direct-collapse black holes.
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