Dark matter could be key to supermassive black hole mystery

Dark matter decays could be the missing ingredient explaining how giant black holes formed before the first stars.

A growing mystery in astronomy is the presence of gargantuan black holes—some weighing as much as a billion suns—existing less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the standard theory of black hole formation, these black holes simply should not have had enough time to grow so large.

The new stu...