UNIVERSE TODAY - One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they hadn't enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well by such missions as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside studied the role of dark matter in the infant cosmos as a way to explain this mystery. Their work shows that the decay of dark matter might have influenced the birth and growth of the earliest supermassive black holes. That still leaves the question: what is dark matter made of?