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OBESE black holes, not stars, may have lit up the first galaxies 鈥� and could have grown into the earliest supermassive black holes.

Black holes usually form from a collapsed star, and then grow by gobbling up material. But how did supermassive ones arise a mere billion years after the big bang?

Perhaps they were born 鈥渙bese鈥�, forming when vast clouds of atomic hydrogen collapsed. Now Bhaskar Agarwal at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues say we could detect the result: galaxies with few stars, each dominated by a black hole that shone as matter accreting around it was compressed (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, ).

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淓arly galaxies were lit by fat black holes鈥�