Direct collapse black holes are high-mass black hole seeds, putatively formed within the redshift range , when the Universe was about 100–250 million years old. Unlike seeds formed from the first population of stars (also known as Population III stars), direct collapse black hole seeds are formed by a direct, general relativistic instability. They are very massive, with a typical mass at formation of ~. This category of black hole seeds was originally proposed theoretically to alleviate the challenge in building supermassive black holes already at redshift , as numerous observations to date have confirmed. Formation Direct collapse black holes (DCBHs) are massive black hole seeds theorized to have formed in the high-redshift Universe and with typical masses at formation of ~, but spanning between and . The environmental physical conditions to form a DCBH (as opposed to a cluster of stars) are the following: Metal-free gas (gas containing only hydrogen and helium). Atomic-cooling gas. Sufficiently large flux of Lyman-Werner photons, in order to destroy hydrogen molecules, which are very efficient gas coolants. The previous conditions are necessary to avoid gas cooling and, hence, fragmentation of the primordial gas cloud. Unable to fragment and form stars, the gas cloud undergoes to a gravitational collapse of the entire structure, reaching extremely large values of the matter density at the core, of the order of . At this density, the object undergoes to a general relativistic instability, which leads to the formation of a black hole of a typical mass ~, and up to 1 million solar masses. The occurrence of the general relativistic instability, as well as the absence of the intermediate stellar phase, led to the denomination of direct collapse black hole. In other words, these objects collapse directly from the primordial gas cloud, not from a stellar progenitor as prescribed in standard black hole models. A computer simulation reported in July 2022 showed that a halo at the rare convergence of strong, cold accretion flows can create massive black holes seeds without the need for ultraviolet backgrounds, supersonic streaming motions or even atomic cooling. Cold flows produced turbulence in the halo, which suppressed star formation. In the simulation, no stars formed in the halo until it had grown to 40 million solar masses at a redshift of 25.7 when the halo’s gravity was finally able to overcome the turbulence; the halo then collapsed and formed two supermassive stars that