Supermassive black holes came before stars in ancient galaxies

"What would you see if you could look into the past of every human being on Earth and see them as they were when they were 5 years old? You'd expect to see people possessing a wide variety of traits: some short and some tall, some heavy and some light in weight, some with larger feet and some with smaller feet, etc."

"But in the Universe, this is precisely what occurs when we look at the earliest, brightest, most active galaxies that contain black holes. In theory, there should be a limit to: how early you can form the first stars (and, hence, the first black holes), how large of a "seed" black hole you can create from those first stars, and how quickly those black holes can grow in mass."

The early Universe was almost perfectly uniform, with only tiny density variations across regions. Theoretical limits constrain how early the first stars and first black holes can form, how massive initial seed black holes can be, and how rapidly black holes can grow. Observations show supermassive black holes already in place within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, exceeding those limits. An explanation is presented for how such objects can arise despite the constraints. Example statistics illustrate the smallness of primordial fluctuations: about 683 regions fall between 99.997% and 100.003% of average density, and so on.

Read at Big Think