New research suggests that dark matter decay could have helped black holes grow to monstrous supermassive sizes relatively early in the infant universe. If true, this could help explain some of the most perplexing observations of the cosmos made by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started beaming data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, the detection of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun as early as 500 million years into the life of the 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos has baffled scientists. That's because it should take at least 1 billion years for black holes to reach "supermassive status."
