Black holes are not merely maelstroms of destruction but may also be creative agents that helped bring order to the cosmos, astronomers have reported in the past year. One clue comes from the discovery of quasars shining just a billion years after the Big Bang. These brilliant objects are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes, which must have begun forming very early in the life of the universe. Stuart Shapiro, an astrophysicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, speculates that a first generation of stars developed directly from primordial clouds of hydrogen and helium. Some of these stars then collapsed into black holes that grew rapidly by swallowing gas and colliding with one another. “If so, the formation of supermassive black holes may be part of the initial birth of structure in the universe,” he says.
Other evidence comes from the analysis of modern galaxies, most of ...
