A Mystery about the Universe’s First Black Holes May Be Solved at Last

As astronomers read back into the first chapters of the universe’s history, they have uncovered a horde of gigantic black holes that seem to have matured much faster than scientists thought possible.

Priyamvada Natarajan is akin to a cosmic biologist. She studies the life of these precocious black holes, objects so dense that they trap all matter and light within their grasp. As an astronomy graduate student, Natarajan was among the first to treat black holes as populations rather than individual objects by studying their general taxonomy and evolution as though they were bats in a rain forest. Now an astrophysicist at Yale University, Natarajan continues to study the behavior of these animals, and she’s turned her focus to understanding how they’re born.