According to a paper published in the journal Nature, the formation of the gigantic black holes, which seem to lie at the centres of most large galaxies, possibly took place shortly after the Big Bang.

Giving the most likely explanation for the rapid appearance of these super-massive black holes, some of which are billions of times bigger than our Sun, the study said that galaxy collisions created unstable gas clouds that created black holes directly, without requiring star formation.

As per the research, conducted by Lucio Mayer and colleagues, supercomputer simulations indicate that the conditions for the origin and growth of these colossal black holes probably started taking shape due to the merger of galaxies when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.

On the basis of the supercomputer simulation, the research team found that the merger of two early galaxies had the capacity to produce a huge disc of rotating gas, which had mass equivalent to many millions of Suns accruing in a small region of space within a few thousand years after the merger.

Noting that “there is an amazing correlation between black holes and their galaxies,” the University of Michigan’s Professor Marta Volonteri said: “Every time you look in a galaxy for a supermassive black hole, you find it; and the mass of the black hole is typically a 1,000 times less than the mass of the galaxy.”