Which Came First: Supermassive Black Holes or Galaxies?

The revolution initiated by the the James Webb Telescope continues: see the popular article and the article “Which Came First: Supermassive Black Holes or Galaxies? Insights from JWST” by Joseph Silk et al published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The objects identified as gigantic primordial blackholes are introduced to explain the extremely fast formation for a few million years after the Big Bang. After this period the formation of stars should have slowed down and the recent galaxies and galactic blackholes would evolve very slowly.

The very existence of this kind of blackholes is in conflict with the standard general relativistic wisdom, which assumes that blackholes were formed as the final state of the development. The primordial blackholes should be formed directly from the concentrations of the primordial plasma without formation of stars. Their presence would catalyze the rapid formation of stars and lead to formation of galaxies.

These visions can be seen as part of the desperate battle of general relativity based cosmology in order to survive the empirical facts. In the TGD framework, space-time is replaced with a 4-surface in H=M^4xCP_2: this predicts standard model symmetries and unifies gravitation and standard model. The choice of H is unique both mathematically and physically.

The TGD based space-time concept led to a new view of cosmology involving cosmic strings (not those of GUTS) as string-like objects carrying monopole magnetic fluxes. They are extremely thin 4-surfaces with a huge string tension carrying energy having interpretation as analog of dark energy. They provide explanation for the galactic dark matter involving only string tension as a paerameter and solving the problems of LambdaCDM and MOND.

1. Cosmic strings dominated before the radiation dominated phase and their decay to ordinary matter was the TGD counterpart of inflation. Cosmic strings were unstable against the thickening of their 1-D M^4 projection to a 3-D flux tube. The string tension of the thickened portion of the flux tubes formed a tangle and the associated dark energy transformed to ordinary matter forming a galaxy around it. Also collisions of cosmic strings generated this kind of tangles.
2. This decay process as an analogy of inflation generated ordinary matter, galaxies and stars and generated the counterparts of the postulated primordial blackholes. During this period the formation of stars was extremely rapid and later slowed down as the findings of the JWT demonstrate.

See for instance this, this, this, and this .

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.