Gravitational Superposition of Baryonic and Non-Baryonic Matter as a Mechanism for Early Formation of Supermassive Black Holes

The discovery of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at redshifts z > 7 — when the Universe was less than 800 million years old — challenges standard models of structural formation. The available time windows for pure gravitational collapse of baryonic matter, followed by Eddington-limited accretion, appear insufficient. We propose an alternative hypothesis: in the young Universe, the higher mean matter density and smaller separation between structures increased the probability of spatial overlap between concentrations of baryonic and non-baryonic matter (including, but not limited to, dark matter). The superposition of the gravitational potentials of these components could create anomalously deep potential wells, accelerating collapse into massive seeds on drastically reduced timescales. Furthermore, we argue that our perception of "cosmological time" and "collapse speed" may be systematically distorted: the global Hubble time is an average calculated for a homogeneous Universe (FLRW metric), but regions of intense collapse follow a local inhomogeneous metric where matter density can exceed the cosmological mean by factors of 10³–10⁶, allowing gravitational evolution much faster than the global mean suggests. Additionally, the observed redshift incorporates cosmological, gravitational, and peculiar motion components whose separation is non-trivial, which can lead to overestimates of distance and underestimates of the local age of these regions. Subsequent cosmological expansion dispersed matter, reducing the frequency of such overlaps and making this mechanism characteristic of the primordial eras.