Direct Collapse Scenario

Not all black holes form from dying stars. In the early universe, massive gas clouds may have collapsed directly into black holes without first forming stars. These direct collapse black holes could explain how supermassive black holes existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang — too soon to have grown from stellar-mass seeds.

The recipe is specific: a cloud of primordial gas with no metals or dust to cool it, kept from fragmenting by light from nearby stars. The whole cloud can then fall into a single black hole of 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses at once.