The dense star clusters JWST sees at cosmic dawn may be seed factories for supermassive black holes

How did supermassive black holes get so big so fast, when the universe was less than a billion years old? They likely needed a head start: a hefty “seed.” A new study argues that the dense, newborn star clusters JWST is resolving at cosmic dawn could be the factories that forged those seeds, through runaway stellar collisions, yielding black holes of roughly 100 to 4,000 solar masses. We explain the idea, and why these are calculations, not a detection.

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