OBESE black holes, not stars, may have lit up the first galaxies 鈥� and could have grown into the earliest supermassive black holes.
Black holes usually form from a collapsed star, and then grow by gobbling up material. But how did supermassive ones arise a mere billion years after the big bang?
Perhaps they were born 鈥渙bese鈥�, forming when vast clouds of atomic hydrogen collapsed. Now Bhaskar Agarwal at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues say we could detect the result: galaxies with few stars, each dominated by a black hole that shone as matter accreting around it was compressed (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, ).
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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淓arly galaxies were lit by fat black holes鈥�
