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by user101hk 1928 days ago
How are supermassive black holes able to grow so quickly to reach such an enormous mass in this early epoch of the Universe? >>> That simpley means that, matter was already there before the Big Bang isn't it?
4 comments

No, it means what it says - the growth rate is too high for known mechanisms, so they’re looking for explanations. The mass in the universe isn’t the issue, it’s that there are limits on the growth rate of black holes which grow through accreting matter.
The article opines that the accretion disk converts velocity of particles around the black hole into the jet, causing more matter to fall in.
That misses the point - jets are one mechanism whereby the matter can lose some energy and fall in, but they occur due to the high energy of accreting matter, and their existance does not solve the problem of the growth rate of these things. We are able to detect and characterize this object in part thanks to the jets, but the problem of mass remains.
There wasn't anywhere for the matter to be yet. The big bang didn't just create matter and energy, it created spacetime as well. That's just a footnote though, gbrown's is the right answer.
That's not quite correct either. I don't think it created... itself?

Maybe you read one of many attempts at an explanation somewhere that used anthopomorphism as a rhethoric device, but the only creative effort in that sense lies with the author.

Unless something changed recetnly, we don't know what has happened in the first moments of the big bang, because "time" stops making sense in these models. The details are beyond me. It seems to imply two things. First, if the model is naively extrapolated in a thought experiment, then back tracking the rapid expansion means you arrive at a singular point, but, as said, we don't get that far mathematically.

Second, arguably then it's still a matter of interpretation of what was "before", and where, or just what!?! As for the creative author, that's not challenging the universe, rather our conceptual space.

Third, the Grand Parent trivially suggests that if an event can't have happened so quickly, then naive extrapolation implies it must have started before the beginning of time. This seems to be a contradiction only because it rests on a paradox, that time had or was started.

There might be more logical, less trivial ways to state and inquire about the paradox, granted.

I gather this is somewhat disputed. In particular, spacetime already exists in some capacity in eternal inflation models.
"Growth" is one option. Another is that some black holes may be chunks of a pre-bang singularity that never expanded/exploded into normal matter. Or they may be matter that contracted into singularities shortly after the big bang when everything was closer together. Black holes that are either giant (billion+ suns) or very small (<1 sun) don't fit into accepted models of how these things are created. That they absolutely exist, at least the big ones, means we don't understand everything just yet.
Probably built on Electron. Supergrowth of anything!