4 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
There's nothing that says a black hole couldn't form at arbitrarily early times. But the only known mechanism by which one actually forms is the collapse of a massive star, which couldn't happen until the first stars formed around a hundred million years after the Big Bang.
There may well be other mechanisms that formed black holes earlier, for example the direct collapse of massive gas clouds has been suggested as the origin of the supermassive black holes found at the centres of galaxies, but currently these are all hypothetical.
Comment by Crazy_questioner at 14/09/2023 at 01:12 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is correct but I'd like to add that we don't have to wait for the natural aging of a single star. Binary/multi-star systems can strip/add mass that may "artificially" create the necessary conditions.