What is a direct collapse black hole?

The only way we know of to form a black hole, that we have observational evidence for, is when a star runs out of fuel and dies; going supernova throwing off its outer layers of gas, after which the core collapses under gravity to form a “dark star’ - one so dense light can’t escape (aka a black hole). But that process only forms black holes that are around 5-50 times heavier than the Sun, the black hole then has to grow to up to a million times the mass of the Sun to become the "supermassive" variety we see in the centres of galaxies and that takes TIME. Time to actually get material to get close enough to a black hole so that it gets trapped there. And surprise surprise JWST has been finding supermassive black holes in the early Universe that are over massive - there’s just not been enough time, the Universe hasn’t been around for long enough for them to grow that big. So people have proposed the idea that there might be a shortcut, a direct collapse black hole, where you skip making stars and instead a gas cloud just collapses straight down into a black hole around a 1000 times heavier than the Sun, which then seeds the growth of supermassive black holes. They’re often used in simulations to jump start growth, but we’ve no observational evidence for them yet... or do we? Because Paccucci et al. simulated what a direct collapse black hole would actually look to us and find it's very similar to what we've seen for JWST's little red dots! #astronomy #astrophysics #blackholes #mystery #JWST #littlereddots #supernova Pacucci et al. (2026) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14368 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com