Astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis and his colleagues have shed new light on how the first super-massive black holes were born. The discovery about the origin of the universe's first super-massive black holes, which formed some 13 billion years ago, fills in a missing chapter of our universe's early history, and could help write the next chapter - in which scientists better understand how gravity and dark matter formed the universe as we know it.

Writing in the journal Nature, Kazantzidis and his co-authors describe a computer simulation they used to date the appearance of super-massive black holes, a finding that challenges the generally accepted theory of galaxy formation - the hierarchical view that they developed as gravity attracted bits of matter which eventually came together to form larger structures.  The universe is generally thought to be about 14 billion years old, so black holes would have begun to appear within the first billion years, according to this theory.

Kazantzidis and a team of researchers developed a new series of computer simulations in which they modeled the evolution of galaxies and black holes during the first few billion years after the Big Bang. Their computer simulations showed that the first-ever super-massive black holes were likely born when those early galaxies collided and merged together.

The implications of this research for cosmology may include a revision of the idea that a galaxy's properties and the mass of its central black hole are related because the two grow in parallel.

Direct formation of supermassive black holes via multi-scale gas inflows in galaxy mergers, August 26, 2010 Nature.