How do supermassive black holes form? New study could have the answer
Using data gathered from three space telescopes, scientists have discovered exciting new details on how supermassive black holes form, according to a new study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
For years, astronomers have disputed how the very first generation of supermassive black holes came about soon after the Big Bang. Now, a team has discovered two items in the early universe that seem to be the source of these early supermassive black holes. These are the most promising black hole seed candidates discovered thus far, the researchers said.
“Our discovery, if confirmed, would explain how these monster black holes were born,” study author Fabio Pacucci, from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, said in a press release.
The researchers used digital simulations and applied a fresh investigative technique to data from the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to discover two black hole seed candidates, which appear to us less than a billion years after the Big Bang and have a primary mass of approximately 100,000 times the Sun.
Finding the source of these black holes
There are two primary theories to describe the development of supermassive black holes in the early universe. One says the seeds grow out of black holes with a mass around ten to a hundred times bigger than our Sun, due to the collapse of an enormous star. The black hole seeds then expanded through mergers with other small black holes and by attracting gas from their environment. However, these objects would have to expand at an abnormally high rate to achieve the mass of supermassive black holes already found in the billion years old Universe.
The new findings back a different theory where some supermassive black hole seeds grew directly out of a significant cloud of gas that collapsed. In this scenario, the growth of the black holes would be accelerated, and would proceed more swiftly.
“There is a lot of controversy over which path these black holes take,” said co-author Andrea Ferrara also a researcher at Scuola Normale Superiore. “Our work suggests we are converging on one answer, where black holes start big and grow at the normal rate, rather than starting small and growing at a very fast rate.”
The team said they expect to perform follow-up observations in X-rays and in the infrared range of the spectrum to see if the two objects have more of the properties projected for black hole seed.
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Image credit: NASA
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