Last month we submitted a paper (arXiv) on the direct collapse of a gaseous cloud into the beginnings of a supermassive star that will then further collapse into massive black hole around 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses.  This paper was led by postdoctoral research Yang Luo at Osaka University and University of Kentucky.  We used the simulation code Enzo to perform this work.  The unique and groundbreaking aspect of this study was that we used radiation transport to understand how radiation slowed any cooling of the gas and thus collapse.  This can change the collapse dynamics and could have impacts on the final properties of the star. We followed the collapse all the way down to the protostellar accretion with resolution