Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.
Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a surprising number of young galaxies containing massive black holes at their centers, churning up the gas within only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Spectroscopic data indicates that these "hidden little monsters" harbor black holes weighing millions of solar masses. The abundance of growing baby black holes challenges theories about how supermassive black holes could have formed so early in the universe's history. While astrophysicists expected JWST to find some early black holes, the sheer number uncovered has shocked astronomers and could rewrite models of galaxy and black hole formation. If confirmed, these observations suggest that massive black holes may have grown much faster than previously believed possible in the infant universe.
So I will read through some of this and try to come back with something worthwhile to say.
Update : I read some more and most of that is just out of my reach. The only paragraph I kind of understand somewhat is this :
(...) conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) theory.[67] In this theory, Penrose postulates that at the end of the universe all matter is eventually contained within black holes which subsequently evaporate via Hawking radiation. At this point, everything contained within the universe consists of photons which "experience" neither time nor space. There is essentially no difference between an infinitely large universe consisting only of photons and an infinitely small universe consisting only of photons. Therefore, a singularity for a Big Bang and an infinitely expanded universe are equivalent. [68]
What's the implication then of Penrose's idea? That no matter the trajectory of a universe some sort of "big bang" singularity is inevitable, or at least is so for many more trajectories than previously thought.
I read through these and try to understand them but mostly I don't like those theories, because (in part) more and more there are disparities between them and observations.
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) is very smooth ; if there was black holes in there I guess we would see (huge) unevenness.
Hummm, or at least, that stupid LCDM would lead to such an expectation. ... that model also put CMB at : 400 000 to 500 000 years after the BBang.
and most distant visible galaxies (and black holes) at : 330 000 000 years after BB.
if we go by this number we have a few hundred million years to produce such big things out of something very smooth.
if we used a different model we could have much more time.
Here's an interesting adjacent paper. The size of black holes formed is (obviously, in hindsight) limited by the cosmological horizon in a standard big bang model, so they would have to form late. Late enough to conflict with CMB measurements, and the authors have to introduce a weird distribution of spacial curvature to compensate.
Yeah, LCDM isn't looking so hot these day. I wonder who's looked at singularity-free theories that might allow a sizeable black hole to already exist before inflation.