Tiny ‘primordial’ black holes created in the Big Bang may have rapidly grown to supermassive sizes

An illustration not to scale of a primordial black hole growing to supermassive scales.

Primordial black holes that formed during the earliest moments of the universe could have swollen quickly to supermassive sizes, complex cosmological simulations have revealed.

The discovery could lead to a solution for one of the biggest problems in modern cosmology: how supermassive black holes could have grown to be millions or billions of times more massive than the sun before the universe was 1 billion years old.