The James Webb telescope peered into the early universe and saw a multitude of mysterious red dots. Their glow didn't resemble familiar galaxies or stars. The answer was unexpected: these are growing black holes, born without a stellar stage. A hydrogen cloud, skipping the infancy of a star, collapses straight into a cosmic monster. Such a newborn then greedily pulls in matter, heating it to a bright glow. Around the hole, a dense gas cocoon forms, which absorbs X-rays but is transparent to visible and infrared light. That's why for Webb the dots are red, while for X-ray telescopes they are almost invisible. Analysis showed that some of these black holes already had a mass of a million Suns in their infancy — comparable to the monsters at the centers of galaxies. This explains how supermassive black holes managed to accumulate billions of solar masses in just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. In essence, Webb captured the moment of their turbulent infancy.
Supermassive black holes can grow so fast that their mass doubles in just 10 million years — by cosmic standards, that's an instant.
It's like the birth of the black hole Gargantua from Interstellar, but without a stellar collapse — right in the early universe.