Did decaying dark matter help create the universe's first supermassive black holes?

New research suggests that supermassive black holes that existed before the cosmos was 1 billion years old may have formed with a helping hand from dark matter, the universe's most mysterious stuff. Ever since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first began reporting data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, it has been delivering a curious problem into the laps of scientists, finding supermassive black holes as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang. That is, however, an issue because the merger and feeding processes that allow black holes to reach masses of millions of billions of times that of the sun should take at least 1 billion years to reach fruition. Scientists have therefore been eagerly searching for a growth mechanism that could explain how supermassive black holes could exist so early in the universe. Now, one team of researchers theorizes that such cosmic titans could have come about before their time, thanks to changes made to galaxies by energy released by the decay of dark matter . One suggested mechanism for the early growth of black holes is the direct collapse of vast clouds of gas and dust to immediately form a seed black hole without the time it takes for a massive star to be born, live its life, and then die. However, that process would still require stars shining on these clouds of matter, providing them with energy — but that's rare. Too rare to explain the abundance of early supermassive black holes seen by JWST. …