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Yale's Priyamvada Natarajan unpacks black hole origins
For much of the 20th century, black holes were viewed mainly as mathematical ideas rather than real objects, according to Natarajan.
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Pranavi Sharma - Sat, 31, Jan 2026
- 02:13 EST
- 9
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Priyamvada Natarajan. / Yale University
Priyamvada Natarajan, an Indian-origin theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University, said recent observations suggest the universe’s earliest supermassive black holes may have formed without stars, reshaping long-standing ideas about cosmic evolution.
Speaking last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Natarajan told Space.com that black holes are not just distant cosmic objects but are tied to everyday technology and to unresolved questions about how the universe took shape.
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“Black holes have a very intimate relationship with each and every one of you,” she told Space.com, adding that “the same equations that govern and explain black holes actually guide GPS.”
She said those equations come from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how mass and energy curve space and time. The same physics is required to correct timing differences between clocks on GPS satellites and those on Earth. Without those corrections, navigation systems would quickly become inaccurate, she said.
For much of the 20th century, black holes were viewed mainly as mathematical ideas rather than real objects, according to Natarajan. That changed in the 1960s with the identification of Cygnus X-1 as the first widely accepted black hole candidate. Astronomers now know that most large galaxies, including the Milky Way, host supermassive black holes at their centers.
Observations have shown that some of these objects already existed when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, a finding that challenges models in which black holes grow slowly from collapsed stars. Natarajan said this timing problem prompted her team to propose that, under early cosmic conditions, large gas clouds could collapse directly into black holes.
Such “direct-collapse” black holes would have formed with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the sun’s mass, she told Space.com, making it easier to explain how billion-solar-mass black holes appeared so early.
She said recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory support these ideas, including observations of UHZ1, a growing black hole seen just 470 million years after the Big Bang.
“It’s a thrill,” Natarajan told Space.com, “to have had the fortune of making predictions that were testable, have been tested, and have been validated.”
She added that studying black holes also shapes perspective. “Studying cosmology in general and black holes specifically really instills a sense of cosmic humility,” she said.
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