I absolutely don't know enough to know how legit or ridiculous that idea is, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I read about it here, and it's been fun to mull over.
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
It would be an incredible thing if you could build a device that emitted tiny black holes over and over and over again, just strip out horizontal lines of matter
Planetary and moon mass black holes are ruled out by gravitational microlensing surveys. Microlensing puts an upper bound on the mass of primordial black holes at ~1/5 the mass of Ceres.
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.
I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no?
> “The most plausible explanation seems to be [that] the black hole developed before the galaxy,” said Marta Volonteri (opens a new tab), a theorist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who helped with the new analysis of QSO1.
For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first:
Symbolic Nakedness at Cosmic Dawn: SFIT Validation on A2744-QSO1 and the Little Red Dot Phase
We introduce the concept of symbolic nakedness within the SFIT (Symbolic Field Invariant Topology) framework and evaluate it using recent observations of A2744-QSO1, a triply imaged, high-redshift quasar candidate at $z\sim7$. In SFIT, symbolic nakedness is defined by a quadruple criterion: (i) horizon breach, quantified by $H(r)=2M(r)/r>1$; (ii) localized collapse intensity, $\rho(s)>\rho_{\max}$; (iii) entropic flux leakage, $L(\Omega)>\varepsilon$; and (iv) absence of topological shielding. Applying this diagnostic to the “Little Red Dot” phase of QSO1, we find all four conditions satisfied: the inferred black hole mass ($\sim 5\times10^{7},M_\odot$) exceeds containment limits, spectral features imply steep gradients, X-ray weakness and Balmer-line strength indicate non-standard flux, and no host bulge or enclosing structure is detected. Within SFIT, QSO1 therefore represents a symbolically naked singularity. The framework is falsifiable: discovery of a massive host or standard X-ray corona would negate this classification. More generally, symbolic nakedness provides a cross-domain diagnostic for unshielded structural collapse, from molecular entanglement to primordial black holes.
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Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.
[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
Is that not an indirect measurement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
[1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.
For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4
The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.