When the universe was young, just under… 1 billion years old, some stars turned into monster black holes. A key mystery in astronomy is: why are there so many supermassive black holes in the early universe?
A new study, supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the European Commission, shows that massive black holes grow when galaxies form too quickly. To make a galaxy, you need stars, celestial bodies born from clouds of gas. Additionally, you also need an invisible substance, called dark matter, which acts as a binder to keep stars from flying out of the galaxy. If the “halo” (halo) structure of dark matter had grown rapidly in the early galaxy, star formation would have stalled. Instead, a massive black hole could form before the galaxy formed. Black holes “eat” the gaseous matter, supposedly used to create stars, and grow bigger and bigger.
A region 30,000 light-years in diameter, located at the center of a group of young galaxies, which produce radiation (white) and metals (green) while heating the surrounding gas. A halo of dark matter just outside heated the region to form three supermassive black holes, each 1,000 times more massive than the Sun. Stars will quickly collapse into massive black holes, and eventually into supermassive black holes in billions of years. Photo: Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Previously, scientists had hypothesized that the intense radiation from galaxies dampened the formation of stars in these new regions and containing black holes. But recent simulations have shown that the galaxy’s rapid growth is a major factor in making black holes so massive.
An illustration of the interior of a 30 light-year wide dark matter halo within a cluster of young galaxies. The rotating disk of gas disintegrates into three parts, then collapses under the influence of gravity to form supermassive black holes. Photo: John Wise, Georgia Institute of Technology
A black hole is an extremely dense object that blocks anything that wants to escape, including light. A star after exploding into a supernova can leave behind a black hole. In another case, a supermassive star could burn its fuel quickly and turn into a black hole, without going through an explosion at all. This is the number of massive black holes that appear during the formation of protogalaxies, according to scientists.
This simulation-based study, published Jan. 23 in the journal Nature, also found that massive black holes are more common in the universe than we thought.
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