Stars alone can???t explain black holes, JWST data reveals

Today, even the most massive of the known black holes represent only about 0.1% of the stellar mass of the galaxy: just one-thousandth of the amount of mass found by summing up all the stars in the galactic environment surrounding it. For a long time, astronomers have wondered just how these supermassive black holes came to be: did they form from earlier generations of stars, or was something else needed to explain them? With a large suite of new data now available owing to the advent of JWST, the answer now seems certain: stars, alone, can’t explain these black holes. Here’s the evidence that leads us to that conclusion.

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Tags: Alone Stars