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Early Supermassive Black Holes First Formed as Twins
Two nascent black holes formed by the collapse of a single supergiant star. From a simulation by by Christian Reisswig (Caltech).
It’s one of the puzzles of cosmology and stellar evolution: how did supermassive black holes get so… well, supermassive… in the early Universe, when seemingly not enough time had yet passed for them to accumulate their mass through steady accretion processes alone? It takes a while to eat up a billion solar masses’ worth of matter, even with a healthy appetite and lots within gravitational reach. But yet there they are: monster black holes are common within some of the most distant galaxies, flaunting their precocious growth even as the Universe was just celebrating its one billionth birthday.
Now, recent findings by researchers at Caltech suggest that these ancient SMBs were formed by the death of certain types of primordial giant stars, exotic stellar dinosaurs that grew large and died young. During their violent collapse not just one but two black holes are formed, each gathering its own mass before eventually combining together into a single supermassive monster.
Watch a simulation and find out more about how this happens below:
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Read the rest of Early Supermassive Black Holes First Formed as Twins (455 words)
© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: Black Holes, caltech, Physics, SMB, space, star formation, supermassive, universe
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/106187/early-supermassive-black-holes-first-formed-as-twins/
