Dark matter could have helped make supermassive black holes in the early universe

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"Key takeaways

• Supermassive black holes typically take billions of years to form. But the James Webb Space Telescope is finding them not that long after the Big Bang — before they should have had time to form.
• ... astrophysicists have discovered that if dark matter decays, the photons it emits keep the hydrogen gas hot enough for gravity to gather it into giant clouds and eventually condense it into a supermassive black hole.
• In addition to explaining the existence of very early supermassive black holes, the finding lends support for the existence of a kind of dark matter capable of decaying into particles such as photons.

... Why, then, is the James Webb Space Telescope discovering supermassive black holes near the beginning of time itself, eons before they should have been able to form? ... astrophysicists have an answer as mysterious as the black holes themselves: Dark matter kept hydrogen from cooling long enough for gravity to condense it into clouds big and dense enough to turn into black holes instead of stars. ..."

From the abstract:

"We investigate the formation of high-redshift supermassive black holes (SMBHs) via the direct collapse of baryonic clouds, where the unwanted formation of molecular hydrogen is successfully suppressed by a Lyman-Werner (LW) photon background from relic particle decay. We improve on existing studies by dynamically simulating the collapse, accounting for the adiabatic contraction of the DM halo, as well as the in situ production of the LW photons within the cloud which reduce the impact of the cloud’s shielding. We find a viable parameter space where the decay of either some of the dark matter or all of a subdominant decaying species successfully allows direct collapse of the cloud to a SMBH."

Dark matter could have helped make supermassive black holes in the early universe | UCLA "Radiation from dark matter may have kept hydrogen gas hot enough to condense into black holes"

Direct Collapse Supermassive Black Holes from Relic Particle Decay (no public access)

A view of the Milky Way supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in polarized light.