Repeated stellar collisions may build seeds of supermassive black holes

UCLA astrophysicists used dynamical simulations to study the extremely compact stellar systems observed by JWST in the early universe. In the model, slower collisions merge stars while faster impacts destroy them. In some dense clusters, repeated mergers can build a single star approaching the mass of the entire cluster, which may collapse into an intermediate-mass black hole and seed the rapid growth of a supermassive black hole. The model also suggests that some little red dots containing rapidly growing central black holes could be dense collision-rich star clusters. Once a black hole forms, its gravity accelerates nearby stars, shifting encounters from mergers toward destructive collisions that release gas. The work is currently an arXiv preprint and simulation-based interpretation, not a direct observation of repeated stellar impacts; spectroscopy, dynamical measurements and peer review must test it.