A Single, 'naked' Black Hole Confounds Theories of the Young Cosmos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.

The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.

We've marked the comment off-topic and moved some of the replies to be root comments, where appropriate.

Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.

We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).

The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.

If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.

IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)

Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.

Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.

However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.

I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.

Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?

They have always been a mystery, because it's not entirely known how these supermassive black holes could have formed, since the known methods of star collapse have upper bounds on size too small to account for these large black holes. The article mentions two hypotheses, primordial black holes somehow formed in the first second after the big bang, and direct collapse of large gas clouds into a black hole.

It's also very exciting to have an explanation for one of the many many "red dots" that were first spotted by JWST and have been very mysterious. If all these were super massive black holes without galaxies that would be fascinating.