Dark Matter Could Seed Supermassive Black Holes

New study suggests decaying dark matter may have helped form massive black holes in early universe.

Apr. 17, 2026 at 4:11pm

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A bold, geometric abstract painting in earthy tones of brown, green, and blue, featuring sweeping arcs, concentric circles, and precise spirals, conceptually representing the complex forces and structures involved in the formation of supermassive black holes from decaying dark matter in the early universe.An abstract visualization of how decaying dark matter may have reshaped the early universe, seeding the formation of supermassive black holes.Riverside Today

A new study led by UC Riverside graduate student Yash Aggarwal shows that decaying dark matter could be the key to understanding the origin of supermassive black holes that formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The research suggests the energy released from dark matter decay could alter the chemistry of early galaxies enough to cause some to directly collapse into black holes rather than forming stars.

Why it matters

The presence of gargantuan black holes weighing as much as a billion suns in the early universe has been a longstanding mystery for astronomers, as the standard theory of black hole formation suggests they should not have had enough time to grow so large. This new mechanism involving decaying dark matter could help explain the origin of these cosmic behemoths.

The details

Aggarwal's team used dark matter—the unknown 85% of the matter in the universe that helps form galaxies—and showed that if dark matter decays, it can leak a small amount of energy into the gas and supercharge the direct collapse rate, allowing some early galaxies to skip the star formation stage and instead directly collapse into black holes. Each decaying dark matter particle would only need to inject an amount of energy that is a billion trillionth the energy of a single AA battery.

  • The research was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in 2026.

The players

Yash Aggarwal

A graduate student at the University of California, Riverside and the lead author of the study.

Flip Tanedo

An associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside and Aggarwal's doctoral co-advisor.

James Dent

A researcher from Sam Houston State University in Texas and a co-author on the paper.

Tao Xu

A researcher from the University of Oklahoma and a co-author on the paper.

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What they’re saying

“Our study suggests that decaying dark matter could profoundly reshape the evolution of the first stars and galaxies, with widespread effects across the universe.”

— Yash Aggarwal, Graduate student, UC Riverside

“The first galaxies are essentially balls of pristine hydrogen gas whose chemistry is incredibly sensitive to atomic-scale energy injection. These are the properties that we want for a dark matter detector—the signature of these 'detectors' might be the supermassive black holes that we see today.”

— Flip Tanedo, Associate professor of physics and astronomy, UC Riverside

What’s next

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope continues to observe unusually large black holes in the early universe that could have formed by direct collapse, providing further opportunities to test this new mechanism.

The takeaway

This research offers a potential explanation for the mysterious presence of supermassive black holes in the early universe, suggesting that decaying dark matter could have altered the chemistry of primordial galaxies in a way that allowed some to skip star formation and directly collapse into black holes.