How to Create a Black Hole Out of Thin Air

"How many ways are there to leave this universe? Perhaps the best known exit entails the death of a star. In 1939 the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Harlan Snyder, of the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that when a sufficiently massive star runs out of thermonuclear fuel, it collapses inward and keeps collapsing forever, shrink-wrapping space, time and light around itself in what today is called a black hole. But it turns out that a dead star might not be needed to make a black hole. Instead, at least in the early universe, giant clouds of primordial gas may have collapsed directly into black holes, bypassing millions of years spent in stardom. ..."

NY Times (Video)

A composite image showing the quasar UHZ-1. The X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in purple; the galaxies and stars are from infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

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