An illustration of a supermassive black hole against a background of dark matter. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

New research suggests that supermassive black holes that existed before the cosmos was 1 billion years old may have formed with a helping hand from dark matter, the universe's most mysterious stuff.

Ever since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first began reporting data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, it has been delivering a curious problem into the laps of scientists, finding supermassive black holes as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang.…