The ongoing trade war has dominated conversations in boardrooms and newsrooms. On-again, off-again tariffs and economically bellicose statements have led to uncertainty, confusion, and even fear. Amid the market turmoil and operational confusion of the last few months, it’s possible to lose sight of a profound underlying change of which these are a manifestation. Even after things calm down (as they will, sooner or later), businesses will have to face a new structural reality: Global commerce has entered an era where competition is directly—and profoundly—shaped by government industrial policy.
Social media star-turned-actor Andrew Bachelor has joined Shamier Anderson in the upcoming Paramount+ and GameTV satirical mini-series Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story.
Bachelor, also known as King Bach, will play U.S. sprinter Carl Lewis, a fierce rival to Canadian Ben Johnson (Anderson) who in 1988 cheated his way to a gold medal in the 100 meter final at the Seoul Olympics.
Bachelor starred in Netflix comedy Coffee and Kareem, alongside Taraji P. Henson, Ed Helms and Betty Gilpin, the Netflix horror The Babysitter: Killer Queen with Jenna Ortega, and the romantic comedy Holidate with Emma Roberts and Kristin Chenoweth.
Bachelor will bring his real-life sprinting background while attending Florida State University, and that of his athlete father in Jamaica, to the role. “Carl Lewis was a hero of mine — not just because of his dominance, but because he excelled in multiple events, just like I did. The rivalry between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis is one of the most iconic in sports history. To be a part of bringing that story to life is an incredible honor and a full-circle moment for me,” he said in a statement.
The six-parter, set to air on Paramount+ and GameTV in Canada in 2026, has also added Kids in the Hall alum Mark McKinney, Karen Robinson, Ennis Esmer, Kristian Bruun, Malaika Hennie Hamadi, Ryan Belleville, Darryl Hinds, Lisa Horner, Emma Hunter, Suresh John, Jonathan Langdon, Gita Miller, Andrew Phung and Dewshane Williams to the ensemble cast.
The Canadian miniseries is produced by New Metric Media and Bay Mills Studios. A synopsis from the producers reads: “Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story is Canadian sprinter Johnson’s definitely-not-biased account of the doping controversy that rocked the 1988 Olympics when he tested positive for banned steroid use, going from hero to zero in 9.79 seconds in what some called “The Dirtiest Race in History”. The series takes a revealing and satirical look at the events surrounding the legendary race and the scandal behind the scandal.”
The series, which has the participation of Ben Johnson, is created by Anthony Q. Farrell (The Office, Shelved, Run the Burbs), who serves as showrunner. He also shares executive producer credits with Mark Montefiore, R.T. Thorne, Anderson and Stephan James.
Lana Maclin will produce and Max Wolfond is a supervising producer. Cory Bowles and Thorne will direct.
Scientists have traditionally described long-term changes to Earth’s marine ecosystems by measuring biodiversity—the number of different species that show up in ancient rock samples.
Until now, no one had measured how marine biomass—the sheer amount of organic material—fluctuated over hundreds of millions of years. A new study published in Current Biologydoes just that, using limestone samples to show for the first time that marine biomass and biodiversity trends aligned over the past 541 million years. The results may help answer questions about how ecosystems evolve over geologic time and how humans are driving a mass extinction in the modern world.
“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales.”
“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales,” said Pulkit Singh, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. Singh’s graduate research forms the basis of the new study.
“This provides a new type of data that allows us for the first time to test some very influential ideas about the causality of long-term biodiversity changes,” said Seth Finnegan, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study.
Counting Skeletons and Shells
As organisms living in shallow marine environments die and settle to the seafloor, their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons are preserved as fossil-filled limestone. The successive layers of this limestone serve as an inventory of the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans over millions of years and are especially valuable to paleontologists because of their high shell content as well as the fact that limestone deposition rates likely stay stable over time, even in the absence of shells and skeletons.
To get a comprehensive picture of biomass over the Phanerozoic eon, Singh and the research team collected troves of data from previous studies that included counts of skeleton and shell fragments in marine limestone samples. In all, the team found data for more than 7,000 samples from 111 studies and conducted point counts for 73 new samples, too.
The data collection required a lot of “intellectual courage” from Singh, said Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. “It took a lot of hard work with no guarantee that we’d get anything informative in the end.”
The gamble paid off: Results showed that “shelliness,” as Payne calls it—a proxy for biomass—generally increased over the past 541 million years alongside recorded trends in marine biodiversity, with dips in biomass aligning with known major extinction events.
The study “provides a link that has been missing until now” that connects long-term biodiversity processes to biomass trends, Finnegan said. The data appear to confirm an idea many paleobiologists expected but had not had the data to demonstrate—that marine animal biomass and biodiversity aligned over Earth’s history, he said.
Singh and the team performed a series of analyses to ensure the trends they were seeing weren’t due to other factors such as depositional environment, latitude, ocean depth, and ecosystem type. No matter how they sliced up the data, the results showed the same trends.
“It’s really rare to get the first chance to document a pattern about life across long histories of time,” Payne said. “There’s theory, but in the end, theory is meaningful when you can compare it to real data.”
The patterns the team uncovered in the limestone were reflected, too, in language past researchers used to describe their samples: An analysis of nearly 16,000 abstracts including descriptions of sedimentary carbonate rock over geologic time showed that the “shelliness” of words used to describe limestone samples increased alongside biomass trends. Words like “skeletal” and “fossiliferous” showed up at higher ratios compared to nonskeletal words in descriptions of samples from times in Earth’s history when biomass was higher.
“It was an interesting, independent confirmation of the rest of the study,” Payne said.
What Biomass Tells Us
Biomass indicates how much energy is available in an ecosystem. For animals, the ultimate source of that energy is created via the primary productivity of photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae. Understanding the relationship between biomass and biodiversity can provide insight into how ecosystems evolve, how diversity arises and collapses, and what the ultimate factor that limits biodiversity in an ecosystem is.
“When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”
“It has been suggested for a long time that the long-term increase in biodiversity is a response to higher primary productivity,” Finnegan said. “When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”
In the ecology of the modern world, scientists have evidence that this is true. But modern scientists live in a “thin little time slice” in which any observations of ecosystems occur on very short timescales relative to Earth’s history, Finnegan said.
Scientists don’t know whether ecosystems work the same now as they did for all of Earth’s history. Long ago, biodiversity may have dictated biomass instead, or the relationship may have been a feedback loop. “Really understanding biodiversity processes means understanding them on the million-year timescale,” he said.
Since humans started to dominate ecosystems, biodiversity has plummeted. Biomass, however, has increased significantly, mostly as a result of animal husbandry and pet ownership. “We have a lot of humans, and a lot of cats and dogs, but not a lot of diversity,” Singh said. The world’s oceans are also “very likely in the early stages of a significant extinction event,” Finnegan said.
Deeper knowledge of how biomass and biodiversity relate over geologic time could help scientists better understand the effects of human-caused ecosystem changes and the drivers of this sixth mass extinction. Humans are altering the planet in a “massive experiment,” Payne said. And the only way to understand planetary-scale experiments is to use the geologic record, he said. “It is the only source of information at the same temporal and spatial scales.”
At least during the Phanerozoic, biomass and biodiversity seem to have been coupled, according to the new study. The results provide a coarse, but robust, picture, Payne said, though “there’s a lot more to learn.”
—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer
Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Biomass and biodiversity were coupled in Earth’s past, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250243. Published on 9 July 2025.
Toyota is building a new race car. We saw the first GR GT3 concept at the Tokyo Auto Salon in 2022, and all the spy videos and patent images since then preview a vehicle similar to that original concept. But it won’t be limited to the track.
Toyota will offer a road-going version of the GR GT3 that will almost certainly wear a Lexus badge in the US. It will likely be called the LFR, with the race version expected to debut early in 2026 and the road-going model to follow shortly thereafter.
Lexus has been dropping subtle hints over the past few months, which means the car isn’t a complete mystery. We’ve rounded up as many of those details as we can; Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming Lexus LFR.
What Will It Be Called?
The GR GT3 name comes from Toyota’s 2022 concept, but the official name should change when it launches. The road car should wear a Lexus badge in the US, and it will likely be called the LFR—acting as somewhat of a successor to the beloved LFA. The LFR will also fill the gap left by the RC and LC coupes, which are both likely to be discontinued after the 2025 model year.
What Will the Lexus LFR Look Like?
Photo by: Nick Lynch / Instagram
The many spy videos and patent images (below) show a long, sleek coupe similar to the GR GT3 concept. The test vehicles in those videos featured massive lower bumper openings with aggressive splitters, canards, wings, and a huge hood vent with radiators—all the necessary hardware for tearing up the track.
The patent images, uncovered in June 2022, make no direct mention of the GR GT3. But it’s hard not to believe that they preview the production model. It looks like what one would expect of a street-legal version of the concept.
The car retains the front splitter and hood vent, which are much less aggressive. The racer’s big wing is missing from the car in the patent, but it still has a sizeable rear diffuser, taillights with triangular accents, and vents reminiscent of the LFA.
It’s also long, with the cabin pushed back on the body just ahead of the rear wheels; It looks like a Mercedes-AMG GT with a squished roof and body kit in profile (fitting, given that the company is testing the LFR alongside the AMG GT). The massive front fenders, with vents, appear to house side-exit exhaust tips that are well out of the way of burning anyone’s calves.
The rendering pictured here imagines what the LFR could look like when it reaches the road.
What Engine Will the Lexus LFR Have?
Lexus hasn’t provided any hint as to what might power the LFR. However, a recent spy video captured the car’s exhaust note, and it sure sounded like a V-8—at least on the track. It could use an evolution of the naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V-8 engine that powers the Lexus RC F GT3, which makes over 500 horsepower.
The Lexus RC F you can drive to work every day also has a naturally aspirated V-8 engine, but it only displaces 5.0 liters while making 472 hp. That’s enough power to get the RC F Track Edition to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds, but it’s unclear if a V-8 will power the production car. There’s certainly enough room ahead of the windshield for one.
While the hard-hitting F-badged version of the car will likely have pure combustion power (and hopefully eight cylinders), the model’s more pedestrian trims could adopt smaller engines and even hybrid setups. Lexus offers the 2024 RC with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine making 241 hp and a naturally aspirated 3.5-liter V-6 with 260 hp.
But, it all depends on where the car will fall in the lineup.
When Will the Lexus LFR Debut?
Photo by: u/Viper287 / Reddit
Toyota Racing President David Wilson suggested earlier in 2024 that the GR GT3 race car could debut at the 2026 Daytona 24 Hours in January. But the road car won’t show up until later.
The Lexus-badged sports car is one reason we won’t see the GR GT3 race until 2026. It was supposed to be ready for the 2025 season, but Toyota reportedly had to delay it by a year due to hurdles in developing the road-going model homologation. We expect Toyota to introduce it in mid-to-late 2025 before going on sale the following year.
How Much Will It Cost?
Photo by: CarSpyMedia
The outgoing Lexus RC F Final Edition starts at $94,120, while the entry-level RC with the turbocharged four-cylinder costs $46,915 (both prices include the destination fee). Lexus’s current lineup also consists of the LC500, which has a $101,200 starting price for 2025.
That said, we expect the LFR to be pricier than both of those models still. Lest you forget, the LFA started at a whopping $375,000 when new, and cost up to $445,000 for the Nurburgring trim. The LFR likely won’t be that expensive, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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What’s good for your aging gut may also be good for your aging brain. The first study of its kind in twins found that taking daily protein and prebiotic supplements can improve scores on memory tests in people over the age of 60.
Published early last year, the findings are food for thought, especially as the same visual memory and learning test is used to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
The double-blinded trial involved two cheap plant fiber prebiotics that are available over the counter in numerous nations around the world.
Watch the video below for a summary on the research:
Prebiotics are non-digestible consumables that help stimulate our gut microbes. One of the supplements was inulin; a dietary fiber in the fructan class. The other, a fructooligosaccharide (FOS), is a plant carbohydrate often used as a natural low calorie sweetener.
To test the effect of these supplements on the aging brain, researchers at King’s College London enrolled 36 pairs of twins over the age of 60.
Each duo was randomly split so that one twin was assigned a daily prebiotic in a protein powder and the other was assigned a daily placebo in a protein powder.
The twin who unknowingly took inulin or FOS generally scored higher on a cognitive test three months later.
Related: Can This Blue Chemical Really Boost Your Brain? Here’s What We Know.
What’s more, the daily fiber supplements were linked to slight changes in the gut microbiome between twins. The beneficial Bifidobacterium, for instance, were more plentiful in twins taking inulin or FOS.
Studies on mice suggest Bifidobacterium reduces cognitive deficits by regulating gut-brain connections.
“We are excited to see these changes in just 12 weeks. This holds huge promise for enhancing brain health and memory in our aging population,” said Mary Ni Lochlainn, a geriatric medicine researcher at King’s College London, when the findings were published in March 2024.
Daily fiber supplements were linked to slight changes in the gut microbiome between twins. (troyanphotos/Canva)
“Unlocking the secrets of the gut-brain axis could offer new approaches for living more healthily for longer.”
King’s College is home to the United Kingdom’s largest adult twin registry, and twin studies are highly valuable when it comes to differentiating between the effect of genetics and the environment on human health.
Past studies on rodents suggest that high-fiber supplements, like inulin and FOS, can ‘feed’ the colon’s microbiome, allowing ‘good’ bacteria to thrive.
Some of these bacterial players are also linked to improved cognitive function in both mice and humans.
Evidence for the close relationship between the gut and the brain is growing year after year. Some experts are now so convinced by the results, they refer to the gut as the body’s ‘second brain’.
But the way these two nervous systems work together remains a mystery.
The recent twin study at KCL suggests that consuming certain ‘brain foods’ may be a promising way to treat cognitive decline.
Twin studies are highly valuable when it comes to differentiating between the effect of genetics and the environment on human health. (recep-bg/Canva)
But while prebiotics might improve some aspects of cognitive function in an aging brain, like memory and processing times, there don’t appear to be significant physical benefits.
Muscle loss didn’t improve among aging twins taking high-fiber supplements, despite the fact that inulin and FOS are important factors in musculoskeletal maintenance.
“These plant fibers, which are cheap and available over the counter, could benefit a wide group of people in these cash-strapped times. They are safe and acceptable too,” said geriatrician Claire Steves at KCL.
“Our next task is to see whether these effects are sustained over longer periods and in larger groups of people.”
The twins that participated in the current trial were mostly female, and even though the researchers adjusted for sex differences in their findings, they acknowledge that there may be some selection bias amongst KCL’s twin cohort.
What’s good for your aging gut may also be good for your aging brain. (Robert Kneschke/Canva)
That said, females are more susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease, and studies like the current one support the emerging idea that cognitive decline is not always a disease of the brain, but may involve external factors, too.
The gut has its fingers in many bodily ‘pies’, including the immune system and the central nervous system. Feeding its microbiome certain prebiotics and probiotics could open the door to treating a plethora of illnesses and diseases.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2024.
Jenna Ortega‘s Wednesday Addams may hate being celebrated as the hero after saving Nevermore Academy in season one, but that doesn’t mean she won’t “die trying” to save her best friend in season two.
While it may be the first time Wednesday has “ever willingly returned to a school,” as Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones) points out in the newly released trailer for season two of Netflix‘s Wednesday, Ortega’s character has her reasons. Wednesday actually likens her return to Nevermore to “returning to the scene of the crime,” because “I already know where the bodies are buried.”
However, there’s one body she doesn’t want to bury this season: her best friend Enid (Emma Myers). “Enid dies and it’s all my fault,” Wednesday teases in the season two, part one, trailer (below) after her mother asks what she saw after seeing the black tears running down Wednesday’s face.
Though “secrets are the bedrock of the Addams family,” Ortega’s Wednesday acknowledges in the footage, she also knows, “The sooner I get answers, the sooner I can save Enid. Or die trying.”
“Wednesday Addams, returns to prowl the Gothic halls of Nevermore Academy, where fresh foes and woes await. This season, Wednesday must navigate family, friends and old adversaries, propelling her into another year of delightfully dark and kooky mayhem. Armed with her signature razor-sharp wit and deadpan charm, Wednesday is also plunged into a new bone-chilling supernatural mystery,” the season two logline reads.
Steve Buscemi, Joy Sunday, Luis Guzmán, Hunter Doohan, Billie Piper, Isaac Ordonez, Victor Dorobantu, Georgie Farmer, Moosa Mostafa, Evie Templeton, Owen Painter, Noah Taylor and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo round out the cast. Creator/showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar also returned for season two of Wednesday, alongside executive producer and director Tim Burton.
Part one premieres Aug. 6 with part two dropping Sept. 3. Watch the trailer below, and check out new photos from the upcoming season.
‘Wednesday’ season two.
Netflix
Emma Myers in ‘Wednesday’ season two.
Netflix
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Joy Sunday in ‘Wednesday’ season two.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers observing a monstrous black hole in an unspoiled galaxy just 700 million years after the Big Bang have found a hint at how these celestial titans grew.
The observations could indicate that supermassive black holes in the early universe grew from so-called primordial black holes, created by density fluctuations just after the Big Bang.
This theory has an advantage over supermassive black hole formation ideas that need time for the first generation of massive stars to form and die, and then for the black holes they birth to merge and feed on copious amounts of gas and dust.
The supermassive black hole observed by JWST is A2744-QSO1 (QSO1), which has a mass of around 10 million times that of the sun, equivalent to 10% of the total mass of its host galaxy.
Supermassive black holes seen in the local universe and thus during later cosmic epochs have masses as low as 0.005% that of their galactic hosts. But the host galaxy of QSO1 isn’t just remarkably diminutive.
This galaxy, seen as it was 13 billion years ago, is also poor in metals, the name that astronomers give to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This indicates it has experienced very few stars exploding in supernovas and dispersing metals forged during their lifetimes.
“QSO1 is extremely poor in oxygen abundance, less than 1% of the solar value, and makes it one of the most chemically unevolved systems found in the early universe,” research team member Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, told Space.com.
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“As oxygen is quickly produced by the first generations of stars, the extremely low chemical enrichment indicates that the host galaxy of this black hole must be fairly unevolved,” Maiolino added. “This is a remarkable finding, as it is telling us that massive black holes can form and grow fairly big in the early universe without being accompanied by much star formation.”
QSO1 can’t have formed from mergers of many smaller black holes created when stars die in supernovas. The lack of metals indicates that widespread stellar death hadn’t happened in this galaxy at the time that JWST saw it.
This could help solve the mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so fast in the early universe, by favoring mechanisms that skip dying stars as cosmic middlemen.
Black holes and ‘heavy seeds’
Ever since JWST started making observations of the early universe, the powerful space telescope has presented cosmologists with a problem: the detection of supermassive black holes prior to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
“The standard scenario is that supermassive black holes should originate from stellar remnants, black holes with masses of a few tens of solar masses, and then grow to very large masses by accreting gas from the surrounding medium,” team member and University of Cambridge researcher Hannah Uebler explained to Space.com. “However, there is a theoretical limit at which black holes can accrete gas and grow.”
Uebler explained that black holes are fed this meal of gas from flattened clouds that surround them, called accretion disks. The immense gravity of these central black holes generates huge amounts of friction in the accretion disk, which becomes very hot and radiates energy strongly, especially in ultraviolet wavelengths.
“The light emitted by the accretion disk exerts pressure on the incoming gas, hence counteracting the effect of gravity,” Uebler said. “If radiation pressure exceeds the black hole’s gravitational pull on gas, that’s when accretion must (in theory) stop. This is the so-called Eddington limit.”
What JWST seems to have found in the early universe, especially within the first billion years after the Big Bang, are black holes that are far too massive to have formed and grown via this scenario.
“Very simply, at such early epochs in the universe, there was not enough time to produce such monsters starting from small seeds and with a growth constrained by the Eddington limit,” Uebler said.
An illustration of the region surrounding a feeding supermassive black hole. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
Scientists have posited a few theories to explain how black holes could have reached supermassive status, with masses millions of times that of the sun, in the early cosmos.
“One possibility is that black holes were born big. This is typically the ‘Direct Collapse Black Hole’ scenario,” Maiolino said. “Under some specific conditions, pristine massive clouds of gas may have collapsed directly to form an extremely massive protostar which would have then collapsed into a very massive black hole, possibly with a mass of 100,000 times the mass of the sun, which can then grow further via gas accretion.”
Another possibility, Maiolino added, is that the cores of primeval galaxies were highly dense with stars, and the rapid merging of stars and stellar remnants may have produced intermediate-mass black holes several thousand times heftier than the sun.
“Yet, another possibility is that early black holes were ‘reckless’ and managed to exceed the Eddington limit,” Maiolino said. “Even short, recurrent bursts of this ‘super-Eddington accretion’ can be very effective in rapidly growing the mass of black holes that were originally very small.”
Maiolino explained that the above scenarios manage to explain QSO1 in extreme cases. However, in the majority of simulations and models involving these mechanisms, it’s very difficult to reproduce the very high black hole mass, the very high black hole to galaxy mass ratio, and, crucially, the very low metallicity of QSO1 simultaneously.
“In the direct collapse scenario, the black hole should be located near an active region where stars have formed vigorously,” Maiolino continued. “Gas from such active nearby regions must rapidly pollute also the surroundings of the newly formed black hole while it grows.
“The super-Eddington accretion scenario runs into similar problems. The large amounts of gas needed to boost its accretion must unavoidably also form a lot of stars, which rapidly enrich the surrounding medium with metals.”
There is another scenario devised to account for the rapid growth of monster black holes that involves primordial black holes, which are hypothesized to have formed within the first second after the Big Bang.
“In this scenario, such putative primordial black holes would have been the very first structures formed in the universe, well before stars and galaxies,” Maiolino said.
This scenario may well be a better fit for the team’s JWST observations of QSO1.
Starting off small: Growth from primordial black holes
The team behind these observations of QSO1 with the JWST points out that the concept of primordial black holes is one that has grown in favor over the last four decades.
“Primordial black holes can emerge from the very early universe pretty much already very massive,” Uebler said. “Additionally, theories predict that they should be very clustered; hence, they could be merging quickly and therefore grow rapidly even before gas accretion.”
According to some theories, these primordial black holes would be the initial seeds around which galaxies subsequently form. The initial phases of accretion onto the black hole would be from pristine or nearly pristine gas, not enriched with metals.
Indeed, recently published research has also suggested the idea that supermassive black holes could have grown from black holes created shortly after the Big Bang.
An illustration (not to scale) of a primordial black hole growing to supermassive scales (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
“As first suggested in the 1960s, a population of primordial black holes may have formed even earlier than the first stars,” Lewis Prole, the lead author of that separate research, told Space.com.
“The existence of primordial black holes would bypass the need for massive stars in the early universe, by acting as the initial seeds for the supermassive black holes observed with JWST,” added Prole, a postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland. “Depending on the formation mass of primordial black holes, which is currently unknown, they can have different effects.”
Prole and colleagues performed the first detailed simulations of the cosmos factoring in primordial black holes. They found that those with intermediate masses could implant themselves in halos containing dense gas and start growing early enough to achieve supermassive black hole status prior to the universe being 1 billion years old.
“Very large primordial black holes may already be massive enough to account for the observed supermassive black holes, while smaller primordial black holes would need to embed themselves into early galaxies and accrete up to the observed masses,” Prole said.
Indeed, the new JWST observations of QSO1 could be the first observational evidence of this growth by primordial black holes. But there is a long way to go before this can be confirmed.
“It is important to note that the primordial black hole scenario also has caveats and does not perfectly reproduce the observations,” Mailino said. “These issues should be explored with additional modeling and simulations.”
In addition to better modeling, higher resolution observations could help researchers to better constrain the actual number of stars that are present in the surroundings of this black hole and, if detected, their properties.
“This kind of data would help to understand whether the black hole really formed unaccompanied by much star formation,” Mailino said. “Ultimately, a definite proof of the primordial black hole scenario would come from detecting such massive black holes at even earlier times in the universe.”
The team’s research has been submitted to the journal Nature and appears as a preprint on the repository site arXiv.
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