Supermassive black holes in the early Universe
The recent discovery of the ultraluminous quasar SDSS J010013.02+280225.8 at redshift 6.3 has exacerbated the time compression problem implied by the appearance of supermassive black holes only approximately 900 Myr after the big bang, and only approximately 500 Myr beyond the formation of Pop II and III stars. Aside from heralding the onset of cosmic re-ionization, these first and second generation stars could have reasonably produced the approximately 5–20 M ⊙ seeds that eventually grew into z approximately 6–7 quasars. But this process would have taken approximately 900 Myr, a timeline that appears to be at odds with the predictions of Λ CDM without an anomalously high accretion rate, or some exotic creation of approximately 10 5 M ⊙ seeds. There is no evidence of either of these happening in the local Universe. In this paper, we show that a much simpler, more elegant solution to the supermassive black hole anomaly is instead to view this process using the age–redshift relation predicted by the R h = ct Universe, an Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) cosmology with zero active mass. In this context, cosmic re-ionization lasted from t approximately 883 Myr to approximately 2 Gyr ( 6 ≲ z ≲ 15 ), so approximately 5–20 M ⊙ black hole seeds formed shortly after re-ionization had begun, would have evolved into approximately 10 10 M ⊙ quasars by z approximately 6–7 simply via the standard Eddington-limited accretion rate. The consistency of these observations with the age–redshift relationship predicted by R h = ct supports the existence of dark energy; but not in the form of a cosmological constant.