medium convictionactive · updated 2026-05-30T00:00:00.000Z
Direct-collapse seeds → supermassive black holes in galaxy cores
There wasn't time for enough stars to die and merge into billion-solar-mass black holes, so the early dense universe may have collapsed giant gas cores *directly* into black-hole seeds that then accreted and merged.
The chain
1
Every major galaxy hosts a central supermassive black hole (Milky Way ~4 million solar masses; the largest known reach tens of billions).
joe-rogan in 2026-05-28-youtube-powerfuljre-joe-rogan-experience-2506-michelle-thaller: "In the center of every galaxy, there's a supermassive black hole that's one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy."
michelle-thaller in 2026-05-28-youtube-powerfuljre-joe-rogan-experience-2506-michelle-thaller: "It seems to be correlated... the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole."
2
The only known way to form black holes is stellar death — but in the early universe there were not enough generations of stars to build holes that massive that fast (a timing problem).
michelle-thaller in 2026-05-28-youtube-powerfuljre-joe-rogan-experience-2506-michelle-thaller: "How do you get that many stars to die?... There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them."
3
The early universe was denser and had more dark matter pulling gas together, so huge gas cores could collapse **directly into black holes** instead of forming stars — heating surrounding gas into a "pseudo-star" while accreting millions of solar masses.
michelle-thaller in 2026-05-28-youtube-powerfuljre-joe-rogan-experience-2506-michelle-thaller: "Maybe at that time the universe just had cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together. Instead of forming a star, the core collapsed into a black hole immediately... forming what they call a pseudo star, millions of times the mass of the sun."
4
In dense galaxy cores, these seeds merge and accrete over time into supermassive black holes.
michelle-thaller in 2026-05-28-youtube-powerfuljre-joe-rogan-experience-2506-michelle-thaller: "In a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine over time, gravity pulls them together, and you build bigger and bigger black holes."
What would falsify this
- Step 3: if the "little red dots" turn out to be ordinary early galaxies (resolved as starlight, not accretion signatures), the direct-collapse-seed reading loses its main evidence.
- Step 1: discovery of major galaxies lacking central black holes would complicate the universality claim.
Contradictions / tensions
- Not confirmed: "we don't know yet that these are... what these objects are." Initially the red dots were mistaken for fully-formed galaxies (the "how are galaxies there so fast?" controversy). One open puzzle was why they emit so few X-rays — partly eased by recent X-ray detections.
Implications
- The james-webb-space-telescope "little red dots" (~400 million years after the Big Bang, ~a million solar masses, fast-rotating compact cores) may be these seeds caught in the act — recent detections of X-rays from some support the accreting-black-hole reading.
- Answers (tentatively) one of JWST's headline target questions.
Companies
Concepts
Open questions