A global team of researchers from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Israel has proposed an answer to a cosmic version of the chicken-and-egg puzzle. Astrophysicists now suggest that the first black holes in the Universe may have appeared before the earliest galaxies. The findings appear in the science journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, as reported by TAJL.
The conclusions draw on observational data gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope, providing new insight into the era when the cosmos was still young and forming structure.
“We know these massive black holes occupy the centers of modern galaxies near the Milky Way, yet finding them at the dawn of time was unexpected,” stated the study’s lead author, Professor Joseph Silk.
Traditionally, it is thought that black holes formed after the collapse of supermassive stars and that galaxies came into existence once the first stars began to illuminate the dark early Universe. Silk and his colleagues, however, found evidence that black holes and galaxies coexisted and mutually influenced each other during the first 100 million years of cosmic history.
Astrophysicists describe galaxy formation as a consequence of a collapsing giant gas cloud. At the cloud’s core lies a massive black hole, acting like a seed that helps drive the conversion of gas into stars and fuels the growth of stellar populations.
“The team argues that black holes emit streams of gas that trigger star formation, significantly accelerating the birth of stars,” Silk explained. “Without this mechanism, it would be difficult to account for the rapid emergence of bright galaxies.”
In earlier work some scientists noted a chaotic pattern of matter ejected by a black hole, a phenomenon that has been described with terms that convey the dramatic nature of these events. The current study reframes that behavior as part of a broader process linking black hole activity with early galactic evolution, offering a cohesive picture of how the first luminous structures arose in tandem with the central engines that powered them. The observations from Webb provide a rare glimpse into those pivotal moments when matter and gravity teamed up to shape the earliest chapters of cosmic structure.