The hole truth

Sindhu Satyavolu's passion for astronomy has taken her from studying Engineering Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to participating in a survey by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). If the survey's results validate a theory she had proposed three years ago, she would help solve a long-standing puzzle: the presence of a large number of supermassive black holes within the first billion years of the universe.

Satyavolu, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), Barcelona, wrote in a paper (bit.ly/black-hole-grow) that supermassive black holes continue to grow even when obscured from view. The JWST has detected — and continues to detect — a large number of supermassive black holes that were present when the universe was less than a billion years old. Could these be the obscured supermassive black holes discussed in Satyavolu's 2023 paper?

"The reason we are discussing this now… is that observations from JWST, which were not available (when the report was published), can be explained by this model," says Jasjeet Singh Bagla, a cosmologist from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali.

Satyavolu says she was awestruck when she found something that had taken shape on her laptop could describe what had happened billions of years ago in the early universe. "When we first saw that our model matched the observations, I was delighted," she says.