Dark matter is taken into account in the leading co-evolution models, but only in a general, overall sense. Some researchers, however, think dark matter, more than a black hole, is clearly connected to a galaxy's birth and development.

Laura Ferrarese, a Rutgers University physicist, analyzed the new dark matter finding. She says it shows that a supermassive black hole, the stars around it, and an all-encompassing dark matter halo are working in concert to build structure.

Taken with other evidence, Ferrarese sees dark matter's role as more significant, or at least more obvious, than many theorists have considered.

"There is an observational correlation between the mass of the black hole and the mass of the dark matter halo, not necessarily the mass of the galaxy itself," she said.

Through this haze of fuzzy information and diverse thinking, theorists must work to explain a stark and staggering fact: Somewhere between 300 million and 800 million years after the Big Bang, the first black holes were born and managed to each gulp down a mass of more than 1 billion suns.

Now before you ponder how these Sumo wrestlers of the early universe must have thrown their weight around in any evolutionary wrestling match, consider this: A black hole typically holds much less than 1 percent of the overall mass of the galaxy it anchors.

The early history of black holes -- what went on in the 500 million years leading up to objects observable with current technology -- is tied back to the development of the very first stars. Speculating about it requires first rewinding to the very beginning.

When the universe was born, there was nothing but hydrogen, helium and a little lithium. All this raced outward for about 300,000 years before anything significant happened. The gas was too compacted and therefore too hot to be stable. Gradually, the stuff of space expanded and cooled enough for gas to "recombine and stabilize to neutral states," as scientists put it.

"For 300 million years, nothing happened," explains Windhorst, the Arizona State University astronomer. "The universe is just sitting there. Then all of a sudden the first stars began to shine."

"The tail end of that is what we're seeing," Windhorst says of the latest Hubble and Sloan survey observations.

Scientists once imagined galaxies forming by a sort of monolithic collapse, in which a giant cloud of gas suddenly fell inward. The modern view is one of "hierarchical merging," in which bits and pieces build up over time. A rough outline of how it all went down is fairly well agreed upon.

The first stars must have been massive, perhaps 200 times the weight of our Sun or more. They would have been almost pure hydrogen -- the primary ingredient of thermonuclear fusion, which makes a star shine.

Massive stars are known to die young. Some survive just 10 million years (the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and just reaching middle-age). A colossal explosion occurs, sending newly forged, heavier elements into space. Remaining material collapses. A mass equal to many stars might end up in a ball no larger than a city. The result: a stellar black hole. These object are so dense that nothing, not even light, escapes once inside a sphere of influence known as an event horizon.

Stellar gravity wells can weigh as little as a few suns. But the inaugural versions might have been 100 times as massive as the Sun or more.

During all these tens and hundreds of millions of years, more stars are being born from the detritus of the first stars. Locally denser regions of gas contract. Stars form groups of perhaps a few dozen, which might be attracted to other star clusters. Eventually, clusters of many thousands of stars develop and began to look and behave like something that could be called a sub-galaxy. Some probably harbored growing black holes near their centers.

Here, theory struggles. Intuition might suggest that many of these huge stellar black holes simply merged until one central object attained enough mass to drive the shape and future development of its galaxy.

If that intuition is right, however, which black hole became the center?

"It may be a question of being in the right place at the right time," says Roger Blandford, a theoretical astrophysicist at Caltech. "It could be accidental."

In fact, nobody knows for sure if the first super-sized black holes developed from a series of mergers -- several dozen solar masses becomes 200, then 1,000, then 10,000, and so on -- or if they collapsed from the condensing gas cloud. "Do they start from 100 solar masses or a million solar masses? That's a good question," Blandford said. "My personal guess is that they start from a few hundred solar masses, but that's a much more speculative business."