A Mystery about the Cosmos’s First Black Holes May Be Disentangled at Last

Astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan hypothesized that black holes can form without the aid of stars. New observations back her theory.

As astrophysicists read back into the initial chapters of the cosmos’s history, they have exposed a horde of massive black holes that seem to have aged much faster than scientists thought possible.Priyamvada Natarajan is similar to a cosmic biologist. She researches about the life of these precocious black holes, objects so astronomically dense that they trap all light and matter within their grasp. As an astronomy student, Priyamvada was among the first to treat black holes as populations instead of individual objects by studying their general taxonomy and evolution as if they were bats in a rain forest. Presently an astrophysicist at Yale University, Natarajan continues to study the conduct of these animals, and she’s turned her attention to understanding how they’re born.

Traditionally, it was believed that black holes form in the wake of a large stellar explosion, and they put on mass as they devour nearby gas reservoirs. But a few observations of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the very early cosmos have suggested that there’s something more to the picture. In 2006 Natarajan and her colleagues offered a radical new explanation for how disks of gas could collapse directly into abnormally colossal baby black holes without ever forming a star. Last year a joint observation by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted a distant, glowing black hole that appears to verify Natarajan’s prediction at last.

“It’s definitely a very strong case in favor of these heavy black hole seeds,” says Raffaella Schneider (an astrophysicist at Sapienza University of Rome). “[Natarajan] having proposed this idea really helped the community to enlarge our view on the different possibilities that can occur.”

Natarajan spoke to Scientific American (a popular American science magazine) about how the new observations support her pitch for “direct-collapse black holes” and what they divulge to us about the ancestry of these creatures.

She was asked what got her interested in study of black holes and their origins. She said, “I’ve always been attracted to the invisible entities in the universe. My work has principally been on trying to understand on a fundamental level the nature of these dark components of the universe—dark matter and dark energy, as well as black holes. I find these objects incredibly seductive and enigmatic. They serve as a reminder of the limits to our knowledge, the places where the known laws of physics break down.”