Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
Astronomers will make excuses for that and say that they didn't really prove that galaxies had black holes in them and that they were really massive recently but the tension has existed for a long time because people suspected that galaxies had huge black holes but there was no path to form black holes that big.
I worked for arXiv in the 00's and had a coworker who'd gotten a PhD in astrophysics about accretion disks who was really bitter about how the poor job prospects in astronomy let senior astronomers bully junior astronomers creating a false consensus about how accretion disks and other phenomena worked. When I first heard about ΛCDM my first instinct was that some bullying was going on. [1]
Observations that the "first billion years" might have taken 10 billion years or so have been coming for a while but with JWST there is an absolute flood of them.
[1] The cold dark matter doesn't bug me half as much as the dark energy. I mean, once you look at anything bigger than a star cluster it's obvious that dark matter is there or otherwise gravity works differently in a way that is huge for objects bigger than a star cluster but doesn't show up in precision measurements at all in the solar system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
but the gap between those and supermassive black holes is huge and it is not so probable that 100 or 1000 of those would merge in the time available.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
"Bañados and his team..." searched systematically "...for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible light (of the Dark Energy Legacy Survey, in this case) but that were bright sources in a radio survey (the 3 GHz VLASS survey)."
So the redshift is very solidly established. And the light from the blazar simply has to be that far back, if it's that far redshifted.
SOURCE: https://www.mpg.de/23880270/record-discovery-points-to-parti...
But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:
ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI.
And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes.
A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.
Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
Of course this begs the next question of how didn't the universe just collapse back in on itself!
Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation for this, too.
This is the biggest reach in your entire essay, that black wholes create new universes. The event horizon is complete cut off from this universe and speculating that generations upon generations of universes are created from black holes is fanciful. Your just shoehorn what is basically a massive anthropic principle onto an interesting cosmology theory unnecessarily.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
No other theory made such accurate predictions. So it might be worth at least exploring the theory and its implications further. Certainly, there is a funding and research mismatch between ΛCDM (which did not predict what we are now seeing) and three-stage cosmological natural selection (which did) that is... startling.
It's an explanation, it fits the observed data. It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified. So until we can verify that new universes are created from black holes, with properties inherited from the parent universe, then it's just speculation. But interesting speculation.
And it's a real question that does need some kind of answer.
To be clear, both Smolin's CNS and Gough's uptake of the theory make predictions and offer ways to be falsified, with Gough making accurate predictions of early galactic structure that Webb would see.
It's good to see people expecting predictions and falsifiability, but I'm curious why that requirement isn't being upheld against the standard model (which has been predicting more and more incorrectly) and string theory (which is unable to offer any predictions and also expects you to believe there are 9 or 11 dimensions or something). In my view, CNS requires the fewest logical leaps of faith.
> The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.