The biggest ever thermonuclear blasts happened in the early Universe, when primordial gas clumps collapsed and created the seeds of supermassive black holes.

Arising even before many stars and galaxies had time to form, the origins of big black holes have been a puzzle. Daniel Whalen of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues used computer simulations to reveal how gas in early galaxies could have cooled rapidly, forming stars that then exploded. The stars quickly collapsed back on themselves, generating turbulence that caused nearby gas clumps to form baby black holes.

In related work, the same team ran other analyses predicting whether light from those supernova blasts would be visible to upcoming space missions. The James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch in 2018, should be able to detect these stellar explosions, the authors find.

Astrophys. J. 777, 99; 110 (2013)