Not to mention if supermassive black holes were being formed by accretion, you would expect to see many intermediate mass black holes (1000-1000000 solar masses) everywhere, but we see almost none.
Why do we assume mass distribution in the early universe followed a regular pattern? We can't explain why the universe isn't isotropic and we can't explain why there's more matter than antimatter so why couldn't there have been clumps of very dense matter ready-made to collapse into a black hole?
This in turn puts constraints on the primordial quantum fluctuations that were inflated during the inflation phase, and backtracking through simulations it puts constraints on the entire dark matter and matter history from now back to age 380,000 years.
Either what we know about black hole formation is basically complete (it goes gas -> star -> black hole -> accretion + collisions) but the environment in the early universe was sufficiently different/dense that parameters which rule out the formation of supermassive black holes now were different. Maybe there were many intermediate black holes just in the millions of years after the big bang and things were still close enough together that accretion could happen and collisions were "likely" at the rate needed to form SMBHs after just a billion years. If that is true we might expect to see many many active galactic nuclei as we get better telescopes and look further back, depending on how quickly such black holes formed.
The other option is there is a mechanism of black hole formation that bypasses the above chain which we understand. People talk about supermassive stars, gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes, or primordial black holes that existed due to essentially random distributions of density moments after the big bang causing some regions of space to collapse into massive black holes which then persisted. Such things are far more difficult to observe, but could be inferred if we don't see many many active nuclei as we get better telescopes but all other indications of the accuracy of the big bang + inflationary theory hold true.
I'm no expert, but wouldn't it make sense that in a non-uniform expanding explosion, the densely packed areas would behave the way density behaves? If the universe expands over time, isn't it denser near the beginning, allowing large scale density events to take place early in time? Couldn't a dense universe have allowed supermassive stars to form that just immediately collapsed?
It's cool to discover it or anything else, but I'm not clear on why we should be surprised?
Article reports some new evidence that seem to support it.
Not every seemingly obvious hypothesis is true.
My personal favourite at-first-counterintuitive law of nature: in orbital mechanics, to catch-up, speeding-up does not work. Speeding up (1) changes the orbit, (2) elevates the orbit, (3) higher orbit has lower speed. (Excluding trivially close distances)
Universe?
Galaxies were still being created much after the Big Bang and the universe coming into existence.
I don't think he has any math to back this up. In his theory, it just… happens.
We've spotted strong evidence for a supermassive black hole (of the kind that tend to sit in the center of galaxies like ours, which contains Sagittarius A*) in an extremely distant galaxy - one that formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy.
What makes this important is that we've seen increasing evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist earlier than we've expect if they were born from the deaths of massive stars and slowly accumulating mass in the way "typical" black holes today do.
This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes. Finding support for this alternative model could lead us to new possibilities in physics.