Which came first: Black holes or galaxies?

The insights upend theories of how black holes shape the cosmos, challenging classical understanding that they formed after the first stars and galaxies emerged. Instead, black holes might have dramatically accelerated the birth of new stars during the first 50 million years of the universe, a fleeting period within its 13.8 billion -- year history.

"We're arguing that black hole outflows crushed gas clouds, turning them into stars and greatly accelerating the rate of star formation," Silk said."Otherwise, it's very hard to understand where these bright galaxies came from because they're typically smaller in the early universe. Why on earth should they be making stars so rapidly?"

Silk's team predicts the young universe had two phases. During the first phase, high-speed outflows from black holes accelerated star formation, and then, in a second phase, the outflows slowed down. A few hundred million years after the big bang, gas clouds collapsed because of supermassive black hole magnetic storms, and new stars were born at a rate far exceeding that observed billions of years later in normal galaxies, Silk said.

"The big question is, what were our beginnings? The sun is one star in 100 billion in the Milky Way galaxy, and there's a massive black hole sitting in the middle, too. What's the connection between the two?" he said."Within a year we'll have so much better data, and a lot of our questions will begin to get answers."

An illustration of a magnetic field generated by a supermassive black hole in the early universe, showing turbulent plasma outflows that turn gas clouds into stars.Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope . The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed about 570 million years after the big ...

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