Comment by moi2388
18 days ago
“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years”
Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.)
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
My take on it is that it's been known for a long time (1970s) that supermassive black holes couldn't possibly have been formed between the big bang and the present, never mind the early times that JWST can see into.
Astronomers will make excuses for that and say that they didn't really prove that galaxies had black holes in them and that they were really massive recently but the tension has existed for a long time because people suspected that galaxies had huge black holes but there was no path to form black holes that big.
I worked for arXiv in the 00's and had a coworker who'd gotten a PhD in astrophysics about accretion disks who was really bitter about how the poor job prospects in astronomy let senior astronomers bully junior astronomers creating a false consensus about how accretion disks and other phenomena worked. When I first heard about ΛCDM my first instinct was that some bullying was going on. [1]
Observations that the "first billion years" might have taken 10 billion years or so have been coming for a while but with JWST there is an absolute flood of them.
[1] The cold dark matter doesn't bug me half as much as the dark energy. I mean, once you look at anything bigger than a star cluster it's obvious that dark matter is there or otherwise gravity works differently in a way that is huge for objects bigger than a star cluster but doesn't show up in precision measurements at all in the solar system.
Blowtorch Theory posits that supermassive black holes formed very early, before the stars. I believe they didn't just form early, but that they were always there and the smoothness of the CMB doesn't come from natural isotropy of 'creation'. In my opinion it's so smooth because on the way to us the light was thoroughly mixed by the chaotic gravity (and now possibly electromagnetism) of all the supermassive black holes of the observable universe and the 'dust' swirling between them that were at the time that CMB light originated, crammed into a bubble of the size of merely 100 mln light-years. The relationship between CMB and supermassive blackholes exists but it's the other way around. It's not CMB that spawned black holes. It's black holes that generated the smoothness of CMB. The smoothness comes from overlapping gravitational lensing of trillion galaxies in concentrations ranging form 100 mln light years to 13 bln and acting for 13 bln years.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
Yes, basically black holes growing speed is limited since when they eat they push away the surrounding matter so there isn't enough time. There are also no black holes in between normal size and super massive, both nearby or far away (in the past because of the speed of light)
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its a cool theory and very appealing to me personally but how confident are we about the age of the blazar?
Glad you like the theory! As for the age of the blazar... Pretty confident.
"Bañados and his team..." searched systematically "...for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible light (of the Dark Energy Legacy Survey, in this case) but that were bright sources in a radio survey (the 3 GHz VLASS survey)."
So the redshift is very solidly established. And the light from the blazar simply has to be that far back, if it's that far redshifted.
SOURCE: https://www.mpg.de/23880270/record-discovery-points-to-parti...
Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.
But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:
ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks.
The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
A single variable to fill innumerable cracks? How would that work? All the cracks just happen to line up so the same value of the variable fills each one? Wouldn't that mean there's just one crack?
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> Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
With the size of quasars we're seeing in the early universe, direct collapse seems likely.
Of course this begs the next question of how didn't the universe just collapse back in on itself!
Inflation seems to have been tuned to ensure this didn't happen, giving the cosmos time to grow while ensuring it didn't grow so quickly that galaxies couldn't form.
Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation for this, too.
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This post is suggesting just such a mechanism:
> The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
I want to correct a misunderstanding I had when reading the article the first time:
The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.