{"id":229572,"date":"2026-01-22T01:50:23","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T07:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/massive-black-hole-mystery-unlocked-by-researchers"},"modified":"2026-01-22T01:50:23","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T07:50:23","slug":"massive-black-hole-mystery-unlocked-by-researchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/massive-black-hole-mystery-unlocked-by-researchers","title":{"rendered":"Massive black hole mystery unlocked by researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/massive-black-hole-mystery-unlocked-by-researchers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s one of astronomy\u2019s great mysteries: how did black holes get so big, so massive, so quickly. An answer to this cosmic conundrum has now been provided by researchers at Ireland\u2019s Maynooth University (MU) and reported today in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41550-025-02767-5\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Nature Astronomy<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe found that the chaotic conditions that existed in the early universe triggered early, smaller black holes to grow into the super-massive black holes we see later following a feeding frenzy which devoured material all around them,\u201d says Daxal Mehta, a Ph.D. candidate in Maynooth University\u2019s Department of Physics, who led the research.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe revealed, using state-of-the-art computer simulations, that the first generation of black holes\u2014those born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang\u2014grew incredibly fast, into tens of thousands of times the size of our sun.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s one of astronomy\u2019s great mysteries: how did black holes get so big, so massive, so quickly. An answer to this cosmic conundrum has now been provided by researchers at Ireland\u2019s Maynooth University (MU) and reported today in Nature Astronomy. \u201cWe found that the chaotic conditions that existed in the early universe triggered early, smaller [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}