Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, quasars were already blazing — the cores of galaxies harboring black holes with billions of solar masses. The puzzle of their rapid growth remains unsolved. One hypothesis invokes a special kind of dark matter made of ultralight particles called axions, which behaves like a wave. It forms a dense knot at the galaxy's center, which, it seemed, would gravitationally pull in gas like a funnel.

But new simulations shatter this picture. The knot doesn't stay put: it quivers and shifts, and the hungry black hole tags along. Feeding becomes like trying to drink from a glass that's constantly being whisked away — sips of gas are rare and chaotic. Often the black hole leaves the dense region, and sometimes it's flung to the galaxy's outskirts, where the gas density is hundreds of times lower, and growth grinds to a halt.

Such a 'rogue' doesn't bulk up. Only intermediate-mass black holes might see a slight boost. So, fuzzy dark matter isn't the 'super-pump' that inflated ancient active galactic nuclei. The mystery endures: either a different type of hidden mass, or other feeding mechanisms. Perhaps the key lies in the properties of the first quasars, visible today at enormous distances.