The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has identified supermassive black holes existing as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang, challenging existing theories of their formation. A research team from the University of California, Riverside, led by Yash Aggarwal, suggests that the decay of dark matter could have played a crucial role in their rapid development. Traditional models propose that black holes form from the remnants of massive stars, a process that appears too slow to account for these early supermassive black holes. The researchers propose that as dark matter particles decayed, they released small amounts of energy that altered the chemistry of primordial gas clouds, enabling them to collapse directly into massive black hole seeds. Remarkably, only a tiny amount of energy—equivalent to a billion trillionth of an AA battery—was needed to trigger this significant change. Aggarwal stated that this mechanism could reshape our understanding of the evolution of the first stars and galaxies, bridging the gap between theoretical models and observational data from the JWST.